For the seventh time in recent years, Canton is host to the United States Gaelic Athletic Association’s national finals, which gathers teams from across the US to compete in hurling/camogie and Gaelic football, sports of ancient Irish origin.
“We’ve got 110 teams spread across 25 states, 80 cities, from Seattle down to Tampa, and from New England down to San Diego,” USGAA chairperson Paul Keane said, “There’ll be about 95 championship games in 58 hours this weekend.”
The event is being held at the Irish Culture Centre in Canton, which last hosted the games in 2021.
The Gaelic games have a variety of different rule sets, such as camogie, the female counterpart of hurling, where both teams of 13 players use a wooden stick called a hurley to strike a small leather ball, called a sliotar, to score points by getting it into a net or hitting a crossbar.
“They just go out there and go at it hammer and tongs for 60 minutes,” said Peter Murray, USGAA vice chairperson.
Murray says a sense of community draws a lot of American players to these sports.
“A lot of good American athletes will get soccer scholarships, basketball scholarships — whatever sport — but when they come out of college, not a lot of them will make professional,” Murray said. “So they have these games to come back to when they’re in their early 20s.
“It’s very social. You make new friends, teammates, and brothers. It’s just a way of keeping people interacting with sports.”
The event is entirely volunteer-based, says Sean Michael O’Regan, vice chairperson of the Munster Council GAA in Ireland, who helps the USGAA with its coaching structures during their events.
“It’s run very professionally, but it’s a volunteer sport from top to bottom, and that goes all the way down then to the players, to the referees, to the volunteers,” Michael O’Regan said. “We value that really sincerely; it’s part of our DNA.
“Seeing these beautiful jerseys from all over America, with the Irish crest and logos of our unbelievable traditional games that we have here, is just wonderful.”
When Murray, USGAA’s vice chairperson, first came to the US 38 years ago, he said it was just Irish people playing Gaelic sports. Today, he sees many American-born players and even some with no Irish connection playing.
“This has been my hobby since I was five years old. My mother and father brought us to the games when we were kids,” Murray said, ”I just love the sports, the competitiveness about it, and the social side to it as well because you have friends from all the different states."
Sam Shipman can be reached at sam.shipman@globe.com.