BY JIM GRAY
Gerry O’Connor has been going to the Showgrounds, man and boy, for more than 40 years, following a near century old tradition of local soccer people worshipping at the ancestral home of Sligo Rovers. It’s a ritual which has been fervently practiced by generations of Sligo men, women and children. Simply put, they are what it says on the tin: supporters.
But in recent years, Gerry has occupied a slightly strange space. He’s still attending the Cathedral of local football, but his mode of worship has slightly changed. He rarely sees a home game these days. He’s too busy being a supporters’ supporter.
Gerry is one of the driving forces of the Bit O Red Supporters Trust (BORST), a unique collection of Rovers’ die-hards whose innovative – and often inspirational – leadership has provided a skin-tight connection between the club and its support base, an umbilical cord which ensures the club is never separated from its lifeblood.
As a community fan-owned club, Rovers could never afford to be aloof from those who provide its heartbeat – the people who go to the games, fork out hard-earned cash for various fund-raisers, promote off-field activities, in many cases live and breathe the bit’o’red. BORST is the manifestation of that abiding connection.
It’s always easy to support successful teams but not so much when the trophy cabinet perpetually harbours more dust than silverware. But, of course, it’s in those lean seasons when tangible backing is most needed. Typically, BORST was established in such meagre times.
It was during one of the club’s fallow periods, around 2005, with the team drifting somewhat aimlessly from one uneventful season to the next, that Alan Kearins and Gary Kelly established BORST. Maybe they lacked a precise vision of where this supporters’ group could go or how it could help, but they were determined to pull a collective blanket around supporters to see if it could extend its protection to the club. A sort of build it and they will come approach.
Some years later, the group was reinvigorated with the addition of new members, fresh ideas, and a club that was open to building meaningful connections with its fan base. The original founders were joined by people like Gerry O’Connor, Gary Kilcullen, Ian Rooney, Donal Kelly, Brenda Kearins, Sue Brennan, Shaun Dunne and Caitriona and Grainne Oates. They harnessed their collective love of the club to become one of the most powerful supporters’ groups in the country.
Although they don’t have a register of members or a formal policy Constitution, BORST is very clear about its mission.
“Our three pillars are fan engagement, providing a voice for fellow supporters, and maintaining an open line of communication with the club. Providing fan services at game has become a huge priority, and it’s developing all the time”, Gerry O’Connor explains.
An early initiative was the provision of a club house at the Showgrounds. The original idea was “just to give people a place to stand in out of the rain to have a cuppa on a bad night”, according to Gerry, but it has become a hive of activity on match nights as supporters mix and mingle, swap opinions or even orations, the essence of a supporters’ get-together.
The origin of the club house illustrates the innovative thinking of the group.
“It was an old prefab classroom in an Athlone school,” Gerry reveals. Through quizzes and various other fund-raisers, the group rustled up an impressive 20,000 euro to purchase and refurbish the pre-fab building, with almost all of the manual labour carried out by the Trust members themselves.
Not content to rest on its laurels, the Trust has since established a thriving merchandise shop, where Gerry’s background in retail ensures a full stock of a vast array of Rovers’ clothing and other paraphernalia. They also run a sweet/coffee shop in the main concourse and three other shops dotted around the ground. In recent months, packed fan-zones have become another regular feature. In all, about 25 BORST volunteers are on duty for each home game, many of them not witnessing a single minute of action on the pitch.
“These shops help to generate badly needed income, 100% of which goes directly to the club. It means practically all of the money spent in the ground on match night stays in the ground,” Gerry points out. “But it’s not just about the money. It’s really about improving the match day experience for supporters.”
A hugely popular spin-off has been the BORST Podcast, launched during COVID, whose weekly broadcasts keep supporters both informed and entertained. Dyed-in-the-wool Rovers fans Conor Lynch, Ronan Flanagan, Shane McGoldrick, James Coleman, Gerry O’Connor, and Fionn Teyssou keep the show afloat, never afraid to tackle difficult issues and offering fans the opportunity to have their say, whatever it might be.
“We get terrific feed-back,” Gerry confirms. “About 500 supporters tune in each week, and we have a feature, Shouts from the Shed End, where people can leave a short voice-note. We get a diverse range of opinions. Some can be pretty harsh if the team has played poorly, and while we don’t edit anything, we are very conscious that people involved in the club, players and officials, are always doing their very best and we do not want to expose them to abuse or personal insult. It’s something we’re always sensitive about.
“At the same time, it’s an important forum to connect fans, to allow them express opinions, and to reach out to fans all over the world. It has become a very important part of what we offer fans.”
Other social media platforms also provide massive exposure for the activities of BORST. Recently, they put up a short clip of an opponent stepping on the toes of Kalin Barlow during a game. It garnered an astonishing 35 million views.
“It just shows you the potential that’s out there. We want to tap into all of that, to spread the Rovers gospel far and wide,” Gerry says.
Indeed, the increasing interest from far-flung fans has become a surprisingly strong feature of the Rovers’ family in recent years, so much so that BORST is currently in the process of establishing a North American Supporters Network. People like Joe Lima in California, Mark Brisky in Utah and Sean Rourke in Alabama, along with Chris McManus and eight other US-based fans, are working on a number of different projects aimed at uniting the Rovers banner Stateside.
Closer to home, the BORST interaction with Rovers has been enhanced by the election of two of its members, Shaun Dunne and Donal Kelly, onto the club’s Management Committee.
“It was important from the beginning that we had a solid relationship with the club,” Gerry explains. “As a fan-owned club, the people who run it realise they have an obligation to stay in touch with the ordinary supporters. An early goal of ours was to have representation on the management committee, and it’s such a positive development that we now have two members on the board. It means we are constantly in touch with the club, there is a clear path of communication, and supporters are now an integral part of the day-to-day running of the club. That’s massively important.”
With the club’s centenary on the horizon, the common thread in nearly 100 years of dogged resilience, often in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds, has been the unbreakable loyalty of its supporters. BORST is the modern manifestation of that admirable tradition, and its members are steadfastly writing their own history.
