Former Galway Senior hurler and All-Star Tony Óg Regan worked as an accountant before pursuing his passion for sport psychology and high-performance coaching. His new book aims to helps people find success and happiness at a personal and professional level. He tells JUDY MURPHY about his own journey.

Getting young people involved in sport, as well as being healthy in its own right, is a great education for life, according to All-star Galway hurler, Tony Óg Regan.

“Community, commitment, punctuality, teamwork, an ability to look outside yourself, and resilience,” are among the life skills it teaches you, according to the high-performance sports psychologist whose new book, MVP: Raise Your Game, Unlock Your Potential, is being launched this week.

If anyone should know the value of sport it’s Tony Óg, who has been immersed in it since childhood. He excelled at hurling, firstly with his local club, Rahoon/Newcastle, then as a county player, winning All-Irelands at various levels, before joining the senior panel and playing with Galway for more than a decade.

An accountant who went on to train as a performance coach, he has worked in that role with many winning teams, including the 2016 Munster and All-Ireland hurling champions, Tipperary; the Limerick hurlers in 2019, and with 2022’s All-Ireland club champions, Ballygunner.

But it hasn’t all been plain sailing for Tony Óg, who is originally from Boleybeg in Rahoon. He’s had to deal with burnout, rejection and unemployment along the way, learning to navigate these and other challenges.

He resented being dropped, in November 2013, by the then Galway manager Anthony Cunningham when he was nearly 30 years old, and describes how he went from being a key county player with All-Star recognition, to being deemed not good enough to be part of the 35-strong panel.

He’d previously been dropped in his early 20s when he wasn’t at his best in hurling or in life, but trained hard and regained his place. At almost 30, feeling low and burned out, he wasn’t going to do that. He was lost and upset though, and it took effort to deal with it and move on.

Tony Óg writes honestly about the good and bad times in this book, which he hopes will benefit people across age groups and from all walks of life.

“Young athletes, for instance, in terms of helping them move through places when they might be feeling stuck, when they haven’t made a team or have been dropped from a squad,” he says. “Parents, in terms of communicating with their children, and company CEOs for identifying and clarifying things, and stepping into new positions.”

There are 10 chapters, with titles such as Confusion versus Clarity, Panic versus Composure, Pessimism versus Optimism and Resistance versus Acceptance. These contain questionnaires and exercises that allow readers to focus on different aspects of their lives and careers, with the first, Confusion versus Clarity, helping people identify their priorities in life. It then offers guidelines on how to achieve these. Further in, there’s advice on transforming negative attitudes into positive ones. And he offers counsel so people can focus on what they can control and let go of what  they can’t.

The exercises are simple and useful and can be revisited as people wish.

“Your identity isn’t fixed,” he says. “You can be invested in different things and you have a choice every day. Things that mattered in your 20s won’t have the same significance in your 40s.”

That’s certainly true for him and his main priority now is family. Tony Óg married Michelle Barrett in June 2022, and, now living in Athenry, they’re kept busy.

“My stepson Callum is 11, our daughter Rosie is 19 months and Harry Óg, is three months,” he says with a laugh, explaining that Harry is named after Michelle’s father: “We had to have the Óg in there somewhere!”

Tony Óg Regan, pictured this week. Photo: JOE O’SHAUGHNESSY.