Early Career
O'Sullivan played for the Garryowen Football Club during the 1970s and 1980s, while teaching physical education, maths, and science in Mountbellew, County Galway. He also played Gaelic Football. In 1982, he played corner forward on the Mountbellew Moylough Gaelic football team that lost the Galway Senior Football Final.
He started his coaching career at a Galway club Monivea RFC before being appointed as a rugby development officer with the IRFU. He followed this with spells coaching at Blackrock College, (first as assistant, then as head coach) Connacht and the Irish Under-21 side. The Under-21 side won the 1996 Triple Crown, beating Clive Woodward's England.
After failing to secure a high profile coaching position in Ireland, O'Sullivan moved to America to coach the US Eagles. He was then appointed as the assistant coach of the Irish national side in 1999, and in 2001 as the head coach following the departure of Warren Gatland.
Read more about this topic: Eddie O'Sullivan
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or career:
“The Americans never use the word peasant, because they have no idea of the class which that term denotes; the ignorance of more remote ages, the simplicity of rural life, and the rusticity of the villager have not been preserved among them; and they are alike unacquainted with the virtues, the vices, the coarse habits, and the simple graces of an early stage of civilization.”
—Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859)
“I doubt that I would have taken so many leaps in my own writing or been as clear about my feminist and political commitments if I had not been anointed as early as I was. Some major form of recognition seems to have to mark a woman’s career for her to be able to go out on a limb without having her credentials questioned.”
—Ruth Behar (b. 1956)