
Coming out as gay in the GAA world
Aghyaran footballer Kevin Penrose is the guest on this week's The GAA Social Podcast on BBC Sounds. The surname 'Penrose' will be familiar to Tyrone football watchers with Kevin's brother Martin having helped the Red Hand County win the All-Ireland Senior title in 2005 and 2008.Growing up in a GAA household, football was the done thing and he played for the club during his childhood and teenage years.However the realisation that he was gay after going to university in Liverpool in his early twenties led to Kevin pulling back from the club to an extent, although he did continue to have sporadic playing stints with the St Davog's outfit based near Castlederg."The whole thing of changing room culture and lad culture was a thing. There are words thrown out there," he recalls.Kevin took several more years to come out to his family and friends and it was during a travelling stint in south east Asia in 2022 when he was aged 28, that he finally broke the news to his mother during a FaceTime call home.The Aghyaran native painted a picture during the BBC podcast of the mental anguish that he went through for five days during a stint in the Thai city of Phuket as he weighed up whether to tell his family and friends about his sexuality. "I felt the travelling was catching up on me and reaching burnout in a way," Kevin recalls"I was in a dark room in a hotel. The motivation was gone to travel and I was just like, 'I can't really do this any more.' I was probably in the room for about five days straight. Wasn't going out, wasn't seeing anyone and I knew myself what it was."I needed to ring home and I needed to tell people and when I made the phone call on the Thursday or Friday with mum, it was just an instant weight lifted."
His mother and father and indeed all his family reacted with love and understanding, which meant Kevin could finally visualise his previous life "of essentially playing two different people….two different characters", coming to an end."Dad is a man of few words. It was just 'right well done' sort of thing. He is just a typical GAA father and he was asking, 'when are you coming home?'. Where are you going today?'"After telling his aunts, uncles and cousins, Kevin, who already had a sizable social media following thanks to the travel videos he had been posting, felt it was time to inform the wider world."I was travelling for another month and with social media, having the platform I just thought 'I'll post this and whoever sees it, that's done and dusted'. Though as long as my family and close friends knew, that's all that really I cared about."By the time he arrived home in Castlederg, the word had spread and 2021 Tyrone All-Ireland winner Ronan McNamee soon got in touch to ask Kevin to return to playing football for Aghyaran. "I was worried in a sense because I hadn't really been fully involved in the team for years….in and out, in and out. I was there but not fully there. "Ronan McNamee asked me to come back playing and was speaking on behalf of the lads and saying 'no one has a problem with this'."
'I know I'm a good footballer'
Three years on, Kevin is firmly established in the Aghyaran senior squad and is looking forward to the 2025 campaign for his club after playing probably the best football of his career in 2024."I know I'm a good footballer and growing up in my teens I was a key player in the group which is now the senior team that we play with. That same group of lads. "It was only last year when I was focused and not worrying about everything else and just there to play football."I do feel 100% included with the team. Not once have a I felt uncomfortable walking into that changing room or when we're on the pitch. For myself, I know I'm really included with the lads, although I know it might not be the case for everyone else in a similar situation within the GAA."Kevin admits that there still occasions he has to personally "call out" certain types of behaviour and comments."If you don't call it out, they won't know any better," he adds.
Social media career
Professionally, he is now making a living from his travel videos with brands using his social media profile to advertise on his platforms. "It started just as a love of outdoors and hiking and during my summers growing up on Camp America. "But Ireland has a lot here too with, cliffs, mountains and the beaches. I've made an effort to explore my own country and with my GoPro camera."Once you grow your following and get people engaged, brands just look at you as a way to push their products and that's where the brand deals come and how you make your money out of it."It's mad to think it's a career but so far so good."
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NBC News
41 minutes ago
- NBC News
NBA champions are usually built the same ways. The Pacers had to be different.
OKLAHOMA CITY — Before the NBA Finals came the phone calls. In the winter of 2022, Sacramento Kings guard Tyrese Haliburton got three career-changing calls within 30 minutes. The first was from his agent informing him, to his shock, that the Kings might trade him. The second conveyed information that Indiana might be the destination. The third was from the Kings' top basketball executive, confirming the trade to the Pacers. 'I hung up, set my phone down, and started crying my eyes out,' Haliburton recalled shortly afterward. Two years later, Haliburton picked up the phone and made his own call. Toronto was open to trading Pascal Siakam, an All-Star forward who had helped the Raptors win the NBA title in 2019. Before Indiana committed to dealing for a player who could be a free agent just five months later, it needed to gauge Siakam's interest in staying long-term in Indiana and with Haliburton as his co-star. Haliburton stepped away from a dinner in Atlanta and called Siakam, whom he knew only slightly. ''Do you want to be here?'' Haliburton asked Siakam. Over the next hour, he heard enough to believe Siakam did. 'We just very much aligned on wanting to win and that being the emphasis,' Haliburton said. Less than a week later, the deal was done — one in a string of trades that has unconventionally built a Pacers roster that is just three wins away from the franchise's first NBA championship, in a best-of-seven series against Oklahoma City that is tied at 1-1. Unlike the league's four most recent champions, Boston, Denver, Golden State and Milwaukee, who drafted and developed their franchise cornerstones, or the 2020 Los Angeles Lakers, who signed LeBron James as a free agent and whose glamour status made them the preferred trade destination for its other star, Anthony Davis, Indiana's front office has struck gold by trading its way up. Of the 10 players Indiana has typically leaned on during this postseason, half were acquired via trades, including three of the top four scorers in Siakam, Haliburton and Aaron Nesmith. Since the Miami Heat built a superteam through free agent signings and won consecutive championships in 2012 and 2013, the only NBA champion to have relied that much on trades were the 2019 Toronto Raptors, who traded for four of their top five leading scorers. 'There's no one right way to do it,' Pacers general manager Chad Buchanan told NBC News. 'This has been successful for us with this group. That's not to say that it'll continue to be successful, and there's other ways that teams have built teams to get to this point. The NBA changes, the dynamic of teams, and how you build teams is always changing. 'A year or two from now, it may be a totally different approach. And I think your job as a front office has got to be to understand what works for you, because what works for us may not work for another market, another team or another owner.' Success in the NBA is a product of drafting good players, signing them as free agents and trading for them. Teams ideally try to use as many avenues as possible. Take Oklahoma City, which although it is a small-market team like Indianapolis, shrewdly netted future MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and a future pick that became All-Star Jalen Williams in a 2019 trade, bottomed out in the standings to score a high draft pick to select Chet Holmgren and last year signed coveted free agent Isaiah Hartenstein. The Pacers are unique in that circumstances have forced their fortunes to be determined heavily by just one tool. Throughout the team's history, owner David Simon has never shown an appetite to be bad enough to 'tank' his way to a high draft pick. The Midwest city has also never been an attractive enough locale to woo elite free agents or disgruntled stars demanding trades. That leaves making trades. And each follows a process of information-gathering. The Pacers, as all NBA teams do, study players' backgrounds to understand their motivations and interests. They look at who would fit coach Rick Carlisle's style of play. Both narrow the pool of candidates. So does identifying which of that group the team likes and can actually trade for under the restrictions of the league's collective bargaining agreement. Siakam fit the criteria, an impression that Haliburton's phone call confirmed. The Pacers couldn't rely on catching Siakam's eye during a brief free-agency pitch. So instead, they traded for him to give him a monthslong preview of what life would be like as a Pacer. 'Obviously, some of these big markets built through free agency,' Buchanan said. 'We can't really do that. It's not a formula for us to succeed with. We've had the trade market.' Siakam 'didn't want warm weather, he didn't want the beach or nightlife, he didn't want [a] big market,' Buchanan added. 'He didn't care about that. Ty is the same way. 'One thing we value that I think OKC kind of certainly said this, too, is we value guys that maybe have been overlooked at some point in their career. They maybe weren't McDonald's All-Americans or five-star recruits or whatever it might be, and they have this kind of edge to them. Like 'I want to prove people wrong.' You put a group of guys like that together, there's a common kind of fiber with them, and they all kind of feed off of that.' A key reason the trade-heavy route is the path least traveled is that although a top draft pick or a star free agent can turn a franchise around immediately, trades take time. And that requires patience from the owner, Simon. In a league in which executive turnover is frequent, Kevin Pritchard has been in place as Indiana's top basketball executive since 2012. By the time Buchanan joined in 2017, Indiana was in a run in which it didn't advance out of the postseason's first round for five straight seasons through 2020, then missed the playoffs entirely the next three seasons. But last year, its second season with Haliburton and months after it acquired Siakam, the team advanced to the Eastern Conference finals, which set the stage for this season's Finals run, the franchise's first in a quarter-century. 'We started 10-15 this year, and [Simon] was like, 'It's OK, it's OK.'' Buchanan said. 'He's never one to get panicky, and that's helpful for the team.' A Western Conference executive said Indiana's dealmaking wouldn't have been possible without a well-respected college scouting department that has identified draft picks who have developed into solid players, whom the team has then been able to flip into more assets. Trading away All-Star wing Paul George brought Domantas Sabonis, who was later used to trade for Haliburton. Yet trades have also led to more trades. Three years after Indiana traded for guard Malcolm Brogdon in 2019, he was sent to Boston in exchange for Nesmith, a little-used player for the Celtics who has come up huge for the Pacers. Nesmith's shot-making keyed Indiana's wild Game 1 comeback in the conference finals against New York, and he has made a staggering 49% of his playoff 3-pointers. In the NBA, what is widely considered the least advantageous position a team can be in is 'the middle' between the elite contenders competing for titles and the bottom-dwellers fighting for top picks. Indiana's ownership has never shown an interest in enduring multiple rebuilding seasons full of losses in hope of landing high draft picks, however. Guard Bennedict Mathurin, who was selected sixth overall in 2022, was only Indiana's second top 10 pick since 1989. Along with Mathurin, the three other home-grown members of the Pacers' playoff rotation were selected 11th, 26th and 31st. Never bottoming out makes roster construction more difficult, but it also comes with advantages. 'There's a lot of value to trying to compete, to win every year, because you're setting a foundation for what your culture is, and that's to compete and fight every game,' an Eastern Conference scout said. 'It's great to tank for those teams that do lose and end up with a high pick and get a great player. But there is some expense in terms of development, because players need to learn not just how to play, but how to win.'


The Sun
an hour ago
- The Sun
Huge Royal Ascot chances ‘dropping like flies' as latest big name ruled out in gut punch to punters
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BreakingNews.ie
an hour ago
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Sarah Leahy determined to bring glory days back to Cork
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