The Early Years
Ballinasloe Town Soccer Club was officially founded in 1951. Perhaps the best way to get an insight into those early days would be to read the following paragraph,
which is an account given by the late Billy Vaughan who was the first Chairman of the club.
Billy unfortunately passed away in the recent past and he will be sadly missed as he had maintained a keen interest
in the affairs of the club all his life.
The successful club as we now know it, began to take shape in the 1950s. Ay this time no games were played in the winter months, so to compensate for the lack of activity, Paddy
Griffin of the Workingmans Club organised a soccer match in the Fair Green. Games
were then organised for every Saturday until the Council found out about it. Every
effort was made to stop the Foreign sport being played in the Green but widespread local support and newspaper coverage in
the Galway Democrat only served to make the pioneers even stronger and they formed a club in 1951.
The very first committee elected were as follows:
Joint Presidents: Fr. Dunne & N.E. OCarroll
(R.I.P)
Chairman: Bill Vaughan (R.I.P)
Secretary: Bobby Walsh (R.I.P)
Treasurer: Tony Bradley (R.I.P)
Committee: J. Lennon, Johnny
Riddell, Jim Riddell (R.I.P), Paddy Griffin (R.I.P), Eamonn
Carroll (R.I.P), Des Byrne (R.I.P), Paddy Greally,M.
Greally, Peter Cummins, Dentist Byrne (R.I.P), Michael
Bradley (R.I.P), Ted Brown, D. Nullins, G. Kelly,
D. Staunton.
In those early years days the club played
friendlies wherever and whenever they could get a game. They played most of their
friendlies in Athlone and Galway City as there were very few clubs in existence in the West of Ireland at this stage. So great was the enthusiasm among the players that they would think nothing of travelling
to Limerick for a game, a trip they made on several occasions.
It was not until 3 years after the club was formed that they got the opportunity to join
an organised league, when they entered the Athlone Summer League and played in the Beamish Cup in 1954. The club did not win any major honours in the Athlone League but the experience gained of playing in a
competitive league was to prove invaluable when this know how was passed on to younger players who cam on stream in the 1960s.
For the first 18 years of its
existence the club played its football in the towns Fair Green but in 1968 the club moved its base to the Curragh Grounds
which at that time was rented from Ballinasloe UDC. In the seventies the club
acquired extra land adjacent to the Curragh Ground from the UDC and in the mid to late 70s major development work took place
at the ground, which involved levelling the new pitch area and improving drainage. The
end result of this was a 3.75 acre site which the club at its disposal albeit still a rented ground at that time.
