NEW ADDITTION: AL CASEY ON COLLEGE, IRELAND AND JOINING KILLESTER BASKETBALL CLUB

For anyone that doesn’t know me I’m from Castlebar County Mayo, played all the way up through school in St.Geralds College we were alright made two All-Ireland finals, lost both (but we’re from Mayo so we’re not supposed to win finals), one of them against Jerome and his Fintans lads, getting to play with Jerome (If he shows up to us in DCU) and most of the lads this year (u20s) so hopefully we’ll win something.

Moved up to the big smoke last year to the college formerly known as” BCU”, didn’t have a club up here so ended up playing for Titans in the u20 cup. About halfway through the year Pete Doyle and Mark Grenell took me under their wing and started bringing me down to D2 training in time for the prestigious Longford tournament. This was the first time I got to don the Killester orange, all the lads were dead sound so it was easy enough to settle in. We had great craic all weekend won a few games and had a few drinks .Hope to see all the lads again next year for “Great Friday”. The next week DCU owned the varsities...best week ever!! Can’t wait for Belfast this year everyone should come. DCU are playing “A” ball this time around though so there is going to be less drinking involved but I’m looking forward to the increased competition, with a bit of luck we might go close.

During the Summer I got to play for Ireland for the first time. It was a great experience which I really enjoyed. We ended up only winning one game (Thank God for Azerbaijan), and although we weren’t the best team there I’m sure we had the most craic. It really was a great bunch of lads that were involved. Our team nights out were amazing, not going to go into too much detail as I have to keep it PG but D2 the night of the Wisconsin game was epic and our last night in Romania was memorable, although a few won’t remember it all....it got messy! I’m not going to say too much but I will tell you Greg Petrovic can bust a move! From a basketball side it was a great learning experience. I really enjoyed going up against some top class players, and learned a lot, particularly how to shoot, as I found out early on that my drop step wasn’t going to work on 7 foot monsters. All in all a great experience hope to do it again next year.

This year I have officially joined Killester playing U20s and D1 which is enough to keep me busy. U20 we haven’t started the best with two losses in our first two games but have yet to have close to a full team together. I have high hopes for this team as it’s my last chance to win a bit of underage silverware. Think we should have a great chance in the national cup and I’d love to help win it for Killester as I don’t think we’ve won it for a few years. Think our first game is on Sunday week as we look to get the ball rolling. I’m currently nursing a broken finger but we should be boosted by the return of Chris Paul aka Eric Westbrooks. D1 season is kicking of Thursday as well so looking forward to that they seem to be a decent bunch despite filling my inbox with crude emails.... Really looking forward to having a consistent string of games, last year I had only College games every few weeks and even when I was playing at home I just had schools games. Now with the Dublin league and Colleges league I’ll have two or three games a week which should help me improve. Hopefully it’ll be a successful season...

Finally I want to take this opportunity to thank Karl Kilbride. Karl drops me home to DCU from training which is a great help so want to thank him for all previous lifts and the many, many future lifts....cheers Karl....

Also shout out to Robbie Clarke his blog is both witty and informative, you should do a Podcast....

Alan Casey