The coach focused on unleashing Northern Ireland’s untapped talent

It is never too late to start a hobby, but it certainly doesn’t hurt to pick up something whilst your young, especially in sport.

As children grow their mental and physical capabilities, learning a sport as technical as archery gives them a head start ahead of older newcomers, producing a solid foundation to work off even before their body has fully developed.  

It is one of the reasons archery coach Marty McCullough has made it his mission to widen the pool of grassroots archery in Northern Ireland, one of the regions in Great Britain.

For services to junior and para archery, McCullough was awarded the British Empire Medal as part of the Royal Family’s New Year’s honours list but he failed to take all the credit.

“I’m the one getting it, but it’s not just me,” said he who started archery himself 10 years ago alongside his son. “Lisa Wheeler, the region’s development officer and Damian Lennon, who’s the lead talent coach over here as well.”

“The three of us work closely as a team and they would’ve been deserving of this as I am. It doesn’t mean a whole lot to me; it’s more for the sport and the team I work with.”

McCullough’s work alongside Wheeler and Lennon in the Northern Ireland archery schools project is particularly eye catching with there now being 11 school clubs in the region, a higher number than traditional all ages clubs.

It is also “in some form” regularly taking place across over 30 schools.

Marty turned to coaching following complications from a car accident and believes current Great Britain recurve archers Conor Hall and Patrick Huston are perfect examples of the untapped, huge potential at junior level with the pair first starting archery at Campbell College in Belfast.

“We’ve had a lot of kids shoot for Great Britain and go all over the world and they’ve come from a very small pool of kids that went to archery clubs.”

“If we can spread the net a bit wider at the bottom, the grass roots, get kids shooting bows the same as kicking the ball, there has to be an awful lot of talent out there that we can tap into because we’ve already had a lot of talent.” 

Above all the project’s aims of setting up school clubs and training school instructors, it is the pure satisfaction and joy of teaching youngsters a sport that holds dear to McCullough’s heart that makes it a fun as well as rewarding job. 

“I just love it,” said McCullough, the person responsible for first teaching Tony Barclay MBE, a visually impaired archer that sits as one of the elected directors for Archery GB. “I love working with the kids, helping them get better and chase their dreams. I’ve had to get better as well to help them.”

“There’s no politics or anything like that to worry about, you’re just starting off with a blank canvas.”

“You’re introducing lots of kids to archery that would otherwise not get the chance. We did sessions in a primary school one day, within three sessions 70 kids got to shoot with a bow and arrow, and they all loved it.”

Even without the soaring success of the project, McCullough is a well renowned coach in his own right having guided a number of junior archers from Northern Ireland into the Great Britain pathway group and has been invited to help coach training sessions at the performance centre in Lilleshall with Stuart Taylor and Duncan Busby.

McCullough, who attended the annual World Archery coaching conference alongside Taylor in November, admits that he’d “love” to one day have a full-time role in Great Britain’s national pathway and his impressive repertoire tells all that this could become a real possibility as he nears completing a level three coaching course.

“I suppose the end goal really is just to keep improving, keep getting better, learn more,” replied McCullough when asked about his ultimate goal in coaching. “I love working with the kids who are in performance but there’s a lot of ups and downs with it.”

“They go on a roller coaster, and it can be hard to watch them struggle, but you have to try and help them.”

The Northern Irishman’s versatility should he become a coach for Great Britain, or any other national team means his journey could go down the para archery route too.

McCullough has recently begun another project at Musgrave Park hospital in Belfast, the same place where his wife was treated for leukaemia, teaching amputees and severely injured patients archery to help with their rehabilitation, but also to identify potential para talent that could go into the next Paralympic cycle.

This, coupled with his junior work clearly defines McCullough as a driving force of all archery in Northern Ireland, aiming to build on Olympians Huston and Hall’s legacy rather than rest on laurels.

To steer aspiring athletes from Northern Ireland to Lilleshall is a credit in itself but to generate large swathes of uptake in archery at school level could be a difference maker not just for Northern Ireland, but for the whole of Great Britain. 

When McCullough officially receives the British Empire Medal later this year at Northern Ireland’s royal residence of Hillsborough Castle, he will undoubtedly dedicate it to Lennon, Wheeler and others but he more than deserves its prestige.

It will never be guaranteed that an archer from Northern Ireland will win an Olympic or Paralympic medal in the next 15 to 20 years as every nation’s pathway programme on the planet will be hunting for the same podiums.

But should it happen, a large part of it will certainly be down to Marty McCullough.

Images courtesy of J. McCullough and N. Jennings.