Dermot’s enjoying coaching buzz after lifetime on the green baize

Dermot McGlinchey has enjoyed a lifetime of involvement in snooker.

Starting off as a child prodigy on the green baize, he developed into one of the top amateurs in Northern Ireland, which allowed him to follow his dream all the way to the main professional tour and he’s now finding enjoyment as a coach.

The Castlederg man burst onto the scene in the Omagh Snooker League in 1982 as a nine year old, winning the Division Two player of the year accolade that season before going on to reach the semi-final of the Northern Ireland Championship just four years later.

It looked as though it would be just a matter of time before he was crowned the North’s top cueman, but that particular accolade took a little longer than expected to be achieved, with Dermot winning his first NI title in 2006, which was swiftly followed by another four years later.

The gap can be accounted for with many reasons, the chief of which is his involvement on the professional tour between 1991 and 1997 and intermittently from ‘97 to his final year in 2011 which is when he undertook the World Snooker coaching course that has given his career in the sport not only a new lease of life, but it has given him a new way to find enjoyment from it.

“I did the coaching course in England with Steve Davis and Terry Griffiths and Chris Lovell,” explained Dermot who had his first taste of coaching in Doha, Qatar, back in 1999.

“I just had that interest and if I’m being really honest, I probably get more enjoyment out of the coaching than the travelling to play and that – I still enjoy it but I really enjoy the coaching, dealing with people, helping people, passing something on, I really enjoy that feeling.

“It’s hard to describe, but it’s a great feeling if you can help somebody and they can go on to do well and play better, it’s a hard feeling to describe, but it’s a good one, a different one.”

As enjoyable as he finds coaching, still being a player means there’s one side of it that he doesn’t particularly like and that is when he has to take on one of his pupils in the Northern Ireland Ranking tournaments.

For example, he has come up against Dunamanagh’s Jamie Gardiner, a former protege of his, on a couple of occasions, and it’s not an experience he would be keen to repeat.

“We’ve played each other twice -he’s beaten me once and I’ve beaten him once,” Dermot said. “If I’m being really honest I find it difficult to play people I have coached. It’s not the most enjoyable experience because you’re always on a hiding to nothing.

“It’s like best friends playing at the World Championships, you hear them on TV saying it’s not the most enjoyable experience – you do your job but it’s not the most enjoyable one.”

If that’s the downside to being a snooker coach, the upside most definitely out weighs any of the negative, particularly his annual involvement back on the main tour when the Northern Ireland Open comes to Belfast.

Each year, you will find Dermot in the thick of the action at the Waterfront as a member of the coaching staff who man the Cue Zone and it’s something he gets as much from as the participants.

“It’s a brilliant week and the amount of enjoyment I get – it’s not coaching in the sense that you have someone for an hour but the satisfaction you get by seeing the joy in people’s faces,” he beamed.

“We had older men, younger men, kids, ladies, people in wheelchairs, all on the table and the amount of joy it gives people, is a completely different feeling than winning a snooker match but it’s one that I thoroughly enjoy.

“Having done the World Snooker coaching course is the reason I got the nod in 2016. If I hadn’t done that course I might never have got it.

“We started in the Titanic and then we moved to the Waterfront and it’s getting bigger and better every year. The amount of people who came through the Cue Zone, I couldn’t even put a number on it.

“And it’s nice to feel like part of the tour again because you do get to meet quite a few players from yesteryear, the likes of Stuart Bingham, Alan McManus, Jimmy White, Tom Ford, there’s loads of them you bump into and it’s nice in that way, it brings back a lot of memories of Blackpool in the early days when we were all in the same boat.

“I had a great chat with Ronnie O’Sullivan too, reminiscing about the junior days and things like that.”

During his years on the main tour, Dermot never made it to Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre for the World Championships, but he’s adamant that he will as a coach in the next couple of years.

“One of the things on my bucket list is to be at the Crucible as a coach,” he added. “I intend to go at least one year as part of Cue Zone. It’s there to 2027 but I do intend to go to it.

“They do it in the Winter Gardens where the BBC do all their coverage until the Friday of the final weekend and then they move over to where they always did it, so that’s something I want to do.”

To get to the World Championships in any capacity would cap an incredible career for McGinchey who has won over 20 Northern Ireland Ranking tournaments during a glittering and lengthy career that has seen him remain in the top 16 of the overall standings for longer than he’d care to remember.

He’s come a long way since bursting on the scene as a prodigious nine year old 42 years ago when he played for his family’s Crescent Inn team.

“We entered the Omagh Snooker League in 1982 when I was nine,” he explained. “We couldn’t enter Division One [straight away], we entered Division Two and I won player of the year.

“I was probably not even 10 by the time [the season finished] so when a man looks back and looks at a nine year old now or a ten year old now, from that point of view, I don’t know how you would describe it!

“And there was also the senior and junior individual [championships] and I was in 10 finals – five senior and five junior – and I won nine of them. I only lost one senior final in the Omagh League and I think I still hold the junior individual record of five titles.

“I didn’t really understand at the time how rare it was for someone so young to be not only playing in the league but doing so well. All I knew was I wanted to play snooker all day every day.”

That fondness of the game led to Dermot moving on to compete at a national level in Northern Ireland and he quickly found his feet against the best players in the Province, reaching the last four of the NI Championship in 1986 before finally winning it 20 years later.

“I reached the semi-final in 1986 when I was 13 and lost on the black – I think that is a record for the youngest semi-finalist, while Robbie McGuigan holds the record as the youngest ever winner – and I lost 5-4 to Colin Sewell, who went on to win it,” he explained.

“And back in those days, the winner and runner-up went to the World Amateur Championship and that year it was in New Zealand, so could you imagine that for a 13 year old!

“I had been chasing the NI title for 20 years, from I lost in the semi-final in 1986. All be it, I didn’t play in the championship in all those years because I was in England but when I won it in 2006 it got me back on the main tour and again in 2010.”

Life on the tour proved tough for Dermot in terms of both the level of competition and being away from home, but he thoroughly enjoyed his time at the top of the sport, which ended in defeat to the man who actually won the NI Open in Belfast two weeks ago where McGlinchey was coaching.

“I followed that dream and I was on the tour steady from I turned professional in 1991 until 1997 then I was on and off until my final year 2011,” he explained.

“My final match was against Kyren Wilson, who won the NI Open, in the qualifying rounds for the World Championship [lost 10-5].

“Other highlights of my professional career were playing in the great venues like the Hexagon in Reading, Plymouth Pavillions, Trentham Gardens in Stoke, which was a popular venue, and another highlight was I beat [former World Champion] Shaun Murphy in his first match as a professional.

“The tour was very tough, extremely tough, but not just from a playing point of view. It was tough being in England, which was different, but I enjoyed it. It was a great experience and it was an achievement in its own right to be on the tour for the guts of 20 years.”

During his years of being ‘on and off’ the tour, Dermot excelled in the amateur ranks, reaching the quarter-finals of the World Amateur Championships in China in 2003 where he ‘played some of the best snooker’ of his career before losing 6-1 to Ross O’Donahue in a game that saw him edged out on three black ball finishes and one frame on the pink!

He also reached the semi-final of the European Amateurs in Austria in 2004, losing to Alex Borg (6-4), who went on to lose to Mark Allen in the final and he also played at the event in Germany, Holland, Poland and Belgium.

While he hasn’t reached those heights in several years, Dermot still plays in as many NI Ranking tournaments as he can each year, regularly reaching the latter stages.

However, he admits that a reduction in the amount of time he can dedicate to practice means he has been unable to add to his tally of titles in recent seasons.

“I still practice if I have a tournament, 100 per cent. I don’t ever neglect that side of it, but I just don’t practice every day any more. It just doesn’t happen,” he acknowledged.

“When I was going really well in my snooker career, I’d hardly have taken any time off, even during the summer months. Maybe as the years went on I’d have taken a week, maybe two weeks, but that would have been about the height of it.

“I find it more in later years that you can’t get away with [not practicing].

“There might have been a time when I possibly could have got away with it a little but, as you get older you just cannot and even if you put the effort in, you can’t guarantee because it’s just life and time and that’s the way things go. It comes down to too many birthdays!”

Despite the lack of overall titles in recent years, Dermot still enjoys competing, which is why he isn’t considering retiring his cue just yet. And he’s also enjoying once again travelling to events with his dad, Dessie senior, who is also the lifetime president of the Northern Ireland Billiards and Snooker Association.

“[Dad’s] been with me all the way. Through the bar and the table being in the bar, that’s how I got started and back in the early days he did all the driving and now he’s back going with me again. We’ve gone full circle,” he said.

“And I wouldn’t keep playing if I didn’t think that if it all clicked for one tournament that I’d win one, but you have to be realistic because I haven’t won a tournament for quite a number of years.

“I’m not going to put a time frame on it but I have cut back on my snooker for a number of years. I’m still in the top 16 which is an achievement in itself,

“I’ve won two Northern Ireland titles in 2006 and 2010 which for all the players here, that is the tournament everyone wants their name on.”

l Anyone interested in receiving coaching from Dermot, he can be contacted via Facebook or the coaching page of the World Snooker website.