Irish U20 Men’s Team

By moycullenbasketball on 26/05/2016

The club would like to congratulate Kyle Cunningham & Joseph Tummon on their recent selection to the Irish Men’s U20 Team who will represent Ireland at the U20 European Championships in Chalkida, Greece from July 15th to 24th.

A fantastic achievement by the two lads, their parents & families, and also for their club teams, the club & the wider Moycullen community. Moycullen Basketball Club are very proud of their achievement and would like to wish them the very best of luck over the summer in the lead up to the tournament and especially at the Europeans themselves (very important note at the end of this post)

Remarkably both Kyle who is 18 & Joseph, 19 are eligible for next year’s U20 team.

Kyle Cunningham

Joseph Tummon

Joining Kyle & Joseph on the squad are:
Gary Barron, Kubs
Jordan Blount, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA
Graham Brannelly, DCU Saints
Charlie Coombes, Southeastern Oklahoma State University, USA
Sean Flood, Templeogue
Conor Gilligan, St Vincent’s
Eóghain Kiernan, Killester
Martin Neary, St. Vincent’s
Stephen O’Hanlon, Trinity-Pawling School, New York, USA
Diarmuid O’Shea, UL Eagles

Head Coach: Darren O’Neill
Assistant Coach: Kevin Foley
Assistant Coach: Pete Madsen
Team Manager: Conor Lilly

The team have been drawn in Group C that includes Greece, Great Britain, Netherlands, Kosovo & Albania. While the game against Great Britain will be of major interest to all Irish fans, one of the highlights will be playing European powerhouse Greece in their home country.
At U20 level there are no easy games and this is especially the case this year with a number of extremely strong Countries competing in Greece: Croatia, Russia, Greece, Montenegro, Bosnia, Iceland & Poland to name but a few, however the team will be hopeful of having a good tournament.

The schedule for the group games is as follows:
15/07 18:45 vs Greece
16/07 14:15 vs Great Britain
17/07 14:15 vs Netherlands
19/07 14:15 vs Albania
20/07 14:15 vs Kosovo

A day off & then the classification round which will see the team play on the 22nd, 23rd & 24th to determine their overall finishing position.

While the tournament is a few months away, the U20 team is the first team in action at Europeans this year & we hope to have regular updates during the games on the club website, Facebook & the twitter machine. Any links, reports will also be posted.

Best of luck to the two lads & here’s hoping that they have a very enjoyable & successful campaign

Self Funding & Fundraising
One final but very important point is that like all our other Internationals, which this year stood at a remarkable 15 players, the lads & their parents self-fund their participation in the programme from the very start. Generally, players don’t fundraise until they make it to the European Championship team so that have incurred a serious amount of expense already with more to come.
The club will be supporting and helping out with a number of fundraisers that are planned throughout the summer by parents and we would ask people to support in anyway that they possibly can.