'People would be going, 'Jesus, who's the little blonde lad?''

JOHN TROY USED to worry about some of the kids he’d bring to the Junior Track and Field All-Ireland Championships at Tullamore Harriers. It wasn’t unusual for a child to freeze when tasked with performing in front of the large stand, which makes what a young Sam Prendergast did at the stadium in 2014 stand out all the more.

Prendergast was 11 and competing in the turbo javelin event for Suncroft AC, of which Troy was chairman. While Troy tried to settle the nerves of his young athletes, he only had to walk Prendergast to the gate and let him off.

“You’d be sending kids into an All-Ireland and they’d be shaking,” Troy remembers.

‘You’d say, ‘Oh Jaysus, you’re going to win something in this’,’ but they wouldn’t because they’d be terrified! But I sent Sam off and he said ‘Ah yeah, I’ll be grand’, and he just goes over and throws and wins the All-Ireland. He threw as well as he could throw, while other kids could throw well at home in the garden but couldn’t throw it out there in the arena in front of everybody.

“It didn’t bother him. He had that little bit of confidence about himself, he was able for it. I often think of that.”

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Suncroft is a small village which sits a 15 minute drive south of Newbridge. GAA is a big draw for the kids that grow up there, but there’s also soccer, athletics and rugby on offer to keep them busy across the year.

Prendergast tried his hand at everything and anything he could.

“If you talked to any amount of people around the parish, the soccer people will tell you he was the best at soccer, the athletics people will tell you he was an unbelievable athlete, but he was just an unbelievable sports star. The way he applied himself was the most impressive thing about him,” Troy says.

“There was a national school between his house and our house, and when he was doing turbojav, you’d see him out there at 12 years of age throwing a turbojav, when he was sprinting you’d see him out there sprinting. When he got a deal with Leinster when he was a young fella, he was out there kicking. He was just absolutely unbelievably dedicated, as was his brother.

Prendergast (right) after winning gold at the Juvenille Track and Field All Ireland Championships in 2014.

“But where he’d be from, down the road from me, we’re away from the village at a place called Cutbush, and if you stopped 100 people in our end of the parish and asked them which was his best sport I’d say most of them would say soccer. He was a huge dribbler of the ball, he’d score goals. I can remember him as a young fella scoring five or six goals in a game no problem at all. He was an absolutely unbelievable soccer player, brilliant, but it would have probably been his third love.”

GAA and rugby topped that list, but Prendergast also had a talent for athletics.

“He’d have a go at everything. Even though Sam was prominently a sprinter he’d have ran the 2000m for you as well, he was a real team player. You’d walk up and ask him to run a 1500m cross country to make a team, he’d just smile and do it for you. He might come nowhere, but he’d do it for you, no problem.

“He was very, very talented. He won a good few All-Ireland medals in shot put and turbojav as a young fella. He was very good at that, very, very good at that.”

Cian – who this season was named captain at Connacht – is three years older than his brother, while sister Lara is the youngest of the three Prendergast siblings.

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“Cian was more of a leader. If you were a point down with 10 minutes to go and there was a bit of a huddle at a football match when they were young lads, Cian would be trying to rise lads, whereas Sam would be standing in the background thinking ‘Just give me the ball lads and I’ll win it for you.’

“He had an unbelievable belief in his own talent. If you asked me for one comment on him, that’s it. If you said I’ll play you in a game of pool there in an hour and I’ll beat you, he’d practice and practice and practice so that you weren’t going to beat him by what you said you were going to beat him. He just really believed in himself.

He was always destined for sport. He was so good and so confident, but never cocky.”

Those characteristics sound familiar with Rob Doyle, who coached Prendergast at underage level in rugby having previously watched him play in GAA and soccer teams alongside his own son. When Prendergast took an interest in rugby, Doyle put his neighbour in the car and brought him up the road to Cill Dara RFC.

“A lovely kid, competitive, loved all sports,” says Doyle. “Probably was more inclined towards soccer and Gaelic before he started playing rugby.

“I kind of smile when I see him push back about his stature because he was actually an 11-year-old playing U13, so he was he was tiny. An inclination would be to put him in at scrum-half, but I knew what his skill set was from watching him play football, so to me he was a natural out-half.

“What I really liked about Sam at 10 was his unpredictability. I saw an interview recently where he referenced Carlos Spencer, and that’s the type of (player he was)… it was high risk, high reward but also high failure sometimes, but it was just great to see. And no different from now, defences didn’t know what to do. He could do the most unpredictable things at any time, I used to love watching that.”

The Prendergasts weren’t the only talented kids in Suncroft but even at a young age Doyle could sense Sam had a high ceiling.

Prendergast playing 10 for Cill Dara RFC in 2015.

In 2015 Doyle had a talented U13s team on his hands. Prendergast was learning his trade at 10, their number eight, Oisín Michel would go on to win a Grand Slam medal as an Ireland U20s front-rower and a handful of others went on to represent their county at minor and U20 level across football and hurling.

Doyle’s team went on a run to a McGowan Cup semi-final but were heavy underdogs against the cup favourites, Mullingar. It’s the one Prendergast game that sticks out above the others in Doyle’s memory.

“That match, that was the one. Sam had a year under his belt at 10 and had that confidence to do things. We raced into a two-try lead at half time and everybody was shocked, including ourselves.”

Cill Dara couldn’t hold on in the second half but Prendergast’s display was an indication of what was to come later down the line.

A lot of the playbook that you see now, he would have been doing things like that at that age, little dinks over the top, crossfield kicks, that delayed pass.”

It wasn’t just the Prendergast kids who were heavily involved in the Suncroft sporting scene. Prendergast’s father, Mark, was juvenile chairman with the GAA club while his mother, Ciara, trained underage ladies football and was secretary of the athletics club for 10 years.

The sporting lineage extends further. On Ciara’s side of the family the Wares were key figures in the successful Éire Óg football team that came out of Carlow to become a force in Leinster across the 1990s. Follow the Ware family tree and it leads to Jim and Charlie Ware, who won All-Ireland hurling titles with Waterford in 1948 and 1959.

“His mother would be a lovely, lovely lady. Works very hard, and his dad would be a great man to apply himself,” says Troy. “The skill would have been there with the kids, but Ciara and Mark would have (done the extra bit) and that really, really paid off for them.

“We had an athletic club but we didn’t have a specific coach to enhance an individual event, so for a couple of years Ciara would have put the lads in the car on a Tuesday or Thursday and brought them to some fellow down the country that agreed to train them for a particular event to get the best out of them, and they both went and won All-Ireland medals out of shot put.

Prendergast (second from left, back) with his Suncroft GAA teammates in 2019.

“So they would have put their heart where their mouth was. I’m not talking monetary, I’m talking time and effort that would have gone in to get the best out of the kids. And it wasn’t just their own kids, his mother and father gave a huge amount of time to the kids in the parish.

“So the breeding was in them in the first place, the skill was in them, and then they put the work in.”

When Prendergast started at Newbridge College, rugby slowly began to take priority.

“I’d say soccer would have been his first thing to drop, which would have broken the soccer lads’ hearts because he really stood out,” says Troy, who was also heavily involved with Suncroft GAA.

“Everybody thought he was going to make it in soccer, he was just so gifted. But the big heartbreak for us was he was a gifted GAA player. He played corner forward but as a young fella you always had him out center forward, you’d have him in the middle of it. You wouldn’t be hiding him up the front at all.

You know the way you see some of the real skilful Dublin players and as they run they just rise the ball before they bend down and pick it up? He was able to do that at about 10 years of age and people would be going, ‘Jesus, who’s the little blonde lad?’

“When he was in the Leinster sub-Academy he came back and he played a minor or an U17 match, they put him up corner forward and he scored about 2-3.”

Prendergast was involved with Kildare development teams from U14 up to minor/U17 level but the GAA came to a halt when he stepped up to the Leinster Academy and before long, he was representing the province at senior level. The rise since has been rapid, with the 21-year-old now a full Ireland international and the leading contender to wear the 10 shirt in the upcoming Six Nations.

Doyle watches Prendergast in the blue of Leinster and green of Ireland and still sees traits he remembers from the young man he coached at Cill Dara.

Sam and Cian Prendergast are now both full Ireland internationals. Dan Sheridan / INPHO Dan Sheridan / INPHO / INPHO

“It’s funny, I was involved for seven years with the Leinster Rugby Area Development squad as a manager, so I would have been in and around Leinster when he was making progress through and my fear was that he would conform to the Leinster way, and that didn’t happen thankfully. Obviously they were brave enough to say, look, he’s got his style, it’s a little bit off the cuff but let’s go with it, and you can see that that’s starting to reap rewards.

“It’s probably instilled a bit of confidence in Sam that Leinster are happy to trust him to play his style. And obviously Andy Farrell feels the same because you can see that he has a lot of time for Sam as well. It’s great to see his progress from all points of view.

“I just hope that time (coaching him) sort of gave him that love of the game.”

The parish of Suncroft have been watching every step closely and will be tuning in again today as Prendergast lines out at 10 for Leinster away to La Rochelle. With Ireland’s Six Nations opener against England fast approaching, it’s shaping up to be another massive couple of weeks for Suncroft’s rising star.

“When I see him playing for Leinster, you’d be as proud as hell that you had anything to do with him,” adds Troy.

“All the times through turbojav or running, every minute of it was worthwhile, and sure that’s why you do it. Hopefully there will be someone else like him coming out of parish some day, please god.”

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