Donegal Boston
Gaelic football club in Boston, Massachusetts
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Donegal Boston GFC is a Gaelic football club which was founded in 1988 in Boston, Massachusetts.
Boston is the second largest division of the GAA on the North American continent, after New York.[1]
They train on Malibu Beach, Dorchester.[1]
Among the club's former players are: All-Ireland Senior Football Championship winners Diarmuid Connolly, Jim McGuinness and Martin Penrose; All Stars Kevin Cassidy, Dessie Dolan and John Lynch; All-Ireland Senior Club Football Championship winner Liam Silke; Ireland international rules footballers Brendan Murphy and Colm Parkinson; former Australian Football League player Ray Connellan.
History
Donegal Boston Gaelic Football Club is known as Donegal GFC or Donegal Boston for short. The club was founded in 1988 by Irish immigrants.[1]
They won the North American Intermediate Football Championship in 1995.[1]
New York county manager Seamus Sweeney, whose team nearly defeated Galway in the 2010 Connacht Senior Football Championship, first became involved in U.S. football after emigrating to Boston as an 18-year-old in the early 1990s, and played for Donegal Boston.[2]
They won their first[citation needed] Boston Senior Football Championship title in 2002. In the 2002 final they scored a late goal from a 21-yard free.[1]
They won the Boston Junior Football Championship in 2005.[1]
In 2008, they won the Boston Junior Football Championship and were Boston Senior Football Championship finalists.[1]
They won the 2015 North-East Men's Senior Football Championship.[3]
They won the 2018 Boston Senior Football Championship.[4] They did so with Dublin All-Ireland winner Diarmuid Connolly, whose transfer stateside was covered by media nationally in Ireland.[5][6][7]
Connolly's unsuccessful effort to play for Donegal Boston again in 2019, when a minor problem with his ESTA could not be fixed before transfer deadline day, was again covered extensively by media nationally in Ireland.[8][9][10][11][12]
In 2019, Donegal Boston were seeking four consecutive championship titles. However, Aidan McEnespies defeated the club in that year's final.[13]
Honours
- Boston Senior Football Championship: 2002,[1] 2004,[citation needed] 2010,[citation needed] 2015,[citation needed] 2018[4]
- Boston Junior Football Championship: 2005,[1] 2008[1]
- North American Senior Football Championship runner-up: 2002,[citation needed] 2003[citation needed]
- North American Intermediate Football Championship: 2005[1]
Players
County players to have represented the club include the following: