The medals keep piling up for Shannon Graham but they’re a bonus rather than a justification for her decision to link-up with Slaughtneil.
Frustrated with her home club Creggan’s inability to field a camogie team, she moved across the Derry-Antrim border in 2015 to play with her cousins and under her uncle, the late Thomas Cassidy, in Slaughtneil.
She’s since won seven county titles, six Ulsters and three All-Irelands but, as she points out, there was nothing inevitable about any of that when she came on board.
“The last time Slaughtneil had won it [the county title] was 2012 and before that was a good number of years,” says Graham. “Sometimes people will say to me, ‘Oh, you’re a blow-in and you were tasting success’ but thankfully the success started to happen after.
“The first year that I played with Slaughtneil we won Derry and we got beat by enough by Loughgiel in the Ulster final and we were all very disappointed and then thankfully we had three wonder years, three Derry, Ulster and All-Irelands in-a-row and we’ve been going strong ever since.”
She didn’t need any of that to know that she had made the right call, however, as forming and reinforcing links and friendships with her mother’s side of her family had already made it worthwhile.
“The first year I was perfectly content. I was delighted winning Derry. I couldn’t think of anything better than that.
“I had always dreamed of an All-Ireland club success but just to be enjoying the camogie and just to be playing alongside your cousins and Thomas Cassidy was a great man and it was a great opportunity for me to get closer to him as an uncle.
“My car mileage is shocking, it’s disgraceful but it’s worth it. I used to stay in Slaughtneil a lot of the time when I was younger and I would have went to Cul Camps and summer schemes and stuff so for me it’s probably more of my club than Creggan ever was.
“That’s the club I grew up playing in but to play alongside your family is a different story.”
While they’ve maintained their dominance in Derry and Ulster, Sarsfields shocked them with a late winning goal when they were on the brink of four-in-a-row in the 2020 All-Ireland final.
Eventual winners Oulart-The Ballagh saw them off in last year’s delayed semi-final and a quick turnaround sees them meet Sarsfields for the fourth time in six seasons in Saturday's semi-final.
“I have great respect for them,” Graham says of the Galway kingpins. “They’re a very talented bunch of players and they’re tightly knit, a bit like ourselves.
“There’s no bad blood or anything like that but it’ll just be an interesting affair after 2020 because they were well prepared for us and they had us well sussed and maybe we held back a bit that day and it’ll be nice to see if we redeem ourselves.”
