‘It was a straight no’: Róisín McCormick on turning down scoliosis surgery to follow camogie dreams

The type of chair matters. This one is fine. It’s just a generic, stackable hotel function-room chair, but at least it has a pancaked layer of padding.

Róisín McCormick shifts position in it slightly, a 2026 Camogie Player of the Year nominee and a daily appreciator of soft seats.

“With most people, their back is nice and flat, whereas my right ribcage is sticking into this chair now as we speak,” says the Antrim forward.

“This chair is grand, it’s comfy, but I would have struggled a lot in, say, lecture halls at uni because they’re the hard-back round chairs and my ribcage would have dug into those the whole time. They were really uncomfortable.”

McCormick was diagnosed with scoliosis at the age of 15.

She’s 25 now. In August, she scored 1-11 at Croke Park in a player-of-the-match performance that led Antrim to a 1-22 to 0-11 All-Ireland intermediate camogie final victory over Laois.

And yet it nearly didn’t happen – this extraordinary playing career she’s managed to cultivate from the weeds of a diagnosis that should have terminated her sporting pursuits as a teenager.

The medical advice a decade ago indicated surgery would mean no more camogie. But that was a sacrifice she was unwilling to make. No family summit was called and no round-table talks were required. McCormick, her mam and her dad agreed collectively, sitting in the consultation room, there would be no surgery.

“It was just basically a straight no,” recalls McCormick.

She has not allowed scoliosis to confine or define her camogie career, but it maintains a presence in her everyday life. If she lies a certain way, occasionally her back might seize up and she could be “frozen there for a minute or two”.

McCormick will be attending the Camogie All-Stars banquet in Croke Park on November 21st where she is shortlisted for Intermediate Player of the Year.

But such glitzy nights in the spotlight tend to be preceded by a cloud of apprehension.

“I’d spend a lot of time thinking about what type of dress I’m going to be wearing so my back is not noticeable,” she says.

“I wish I could nearly accept it at this stage but I would still be quite insecure about it. If I’m walking around or if I’m in the gym, I would be conscious of standing very proper and holding a very upright posture so that people don’t notice.

“So, you can imagine what it was like when you were 15 and 16, your ribcage sticking out on one side and your back uneven. That’s definitely something I struggled with then and I still do.”

For anybody who has seen her in full flight, it is hard to marry that silent struggle with a player who has been one of the game’s best forwards for the last decade.

McCormick was playing with the Antrim under-16s when she first started to notice some back pain. On the bus travelling home from a game, McCormick – in an effort to try relieve the ache – persuaded a team-mate to give her a back rub.

“She mentioned my back looked a bit weird. ‘Why is your ribcage sticking out?’ I thought maybe it was the way I was lying.”

It wasn’t.

McCormick had a curvature of the spine in her upper thoracic, pushing her ribcage out. Surgery was tabled as an option. But it came with an added sting in the tail.

She had celebrated another birthday by the time all the necessary scans were completed. And that was significant because the medical opinion indicated she had missed her window.

“At 16, girls stop their growing stage. If I got the surgery before 16, I would have been able to go back to play camogie. As you grow, it (the spine) should then grow properly with the rod, whereas it wouldn’t have been feasible as much for me to go back to sport after 16. Basically, it would have been too dangerous.”

And with her parents naturally concerned about the general risks associated with any spinal surgery, that option was pucked firmly down the road.

“Camogie is my identity, it’s the only thing I ever do or talk about,” she says. “I would lose a massive part of my personality if I wasn’t playing. The surgery wasn’t an option in my household. And my mum and dad, to this day, would tell me never to get it.”

As a teenager, it was also the path of least resistance.

“I don’t think at the time I realised how big of a deal it was. I was just like, ‘No, I want to play camogie’. You weren’t thinking of future complications or anything like that. You didn’t want to be going for surgery, you just wanted to play camogie with your friends. To this day, I don’t regret not getting the surgery.”

Ten years on and she has since put down a body of work with Antrim and Loughgiel Shamrocks that has defied her condition. Loughgiel won 12 Antrim titles on the bounce between 2014-2025. They also claimed six Ulsters during that spell and contested an All-Ireland club senior final in 2022.

McCormick scored 0-9 in the 2021 All-Ireland intermediate final when Antrim beat Kilkenny. They were relegated from senior in 2024, but in 2026 McCormick produced her best-ever season with the Saffrons as they won the intermediate title again.

Despite her star turn this year, though, McCormick has become aware of her body throwing some warning darts.

“I’m starting to realise it’s affecting me more than it would have in the past. It’s my upper right back that’s affected but because I’m compensating for that, it’s starting to cause sciatica in [my lower left back]. That’s something I’m trying to get on top of at the minute.”

Taking time away from training or playing appears to be counterproductive too. She took a short break between the county and club campaigns.

“But the first match back with the club I was in agony, I could barely run. Then my back was fine two weeks later, so it’s as if I nearly need to keep playing for it not to hurt me.”

Truth is, she has always been a tad hardcore. Loughgiel have a proud tradition of producing talented camogie players and hurlers. When McCormick was younger, the club used to organise matches for the girls to play the boys two years down (i.e. under-14 camogie v under-12 hurlers).

“We loved those games but they have been taken away now because there were a few rows,” she says with a smirk that suggests if she wasn’t the instigator of them, she was likely in the middle of those squabbles.

Just over three years after her scoliosis diagnosis, McCormick was knocked unconscious following a high-impact collision during an All-Ireland championship game against Westmeath in Kinnegad. After spending over half an hour on the pitch waiting for an ambulance, the game was abandoned and she was eventually taken to hospital. McCormick was discharged the following morning with her neck in a brace.

That, you might think, could have been her Road to Damascus moment. But a couple of weeks later she was back on the team bus on the road to Glenariffe instead to play Kilkenny.

And it would be flippant to pretend the journey to this triumphant 2026 intercounty season was all roses. Despite being one of camogie’s top forwards, McCormick found herself dealing with the thorns of pre-match anxiety in recent seasons.

Before matches during Loughgiel’s run to last year’s club semi-finals, she was constantly getting sick.

“I couldn’t control it, I was vomiting before every game. I didn’t feel nervous but it was obviously my body’s way of reacting to nerves. It was possibly the pressure I was putting on myself. I have a lot of expectations of myself.”

One of her closest friends and team-mates, Amy Boyle, noticed McCormick’s new pre-match ritual and suggested talking to somebody.

“I never believed much in psychology beforehand, I’d have been like, ‘Sure I’m grand, as long as I’m happy going out to a game’. And I’d still say that’s the most important thing, but I needed to learn how to take the pressure off myself and reframe my language.

“I would have been always like ‘I need to do this’, ‘I need to score this amount’, instead of ‘I can’ or ‘I want to’, so I’ve worked [with the sports psychologists] a lot on reframing my language.”

As she tried to figure out all of that, a community of previously despairing families found her inspirational scoliosis story. The messages started to arrive from parents with fresh hope, fascinated by her achievements, her resilience, her stubbornness.

Playing in an All-Ireland final at Croke Park with scoliosis. How? And if you can do that, perhaps my kid can continue to puck a sliotar or kick a ball or chase a dream.

“Reading some of the messages, it does make you think. To be diagnosed with something like scoliosis at 15 and told that your career could possibly be over, but 10 years later to still be playing despite having a high-level degree of a spinal issue, I suppose it is kind of amazing.”

No kind of about it.

“To be honest, I’ve been quite blessed compared to other people with it, and I think that is because of sport, through strengthening my back with gym work. I think that’s definitely helped.”

She started a work placement with the GPA in April, and having completed a master’s degree in digital marketing, she took up a full-time role with the players’ body in July.

Recently, she has also had conversations with people who say they are aware of female scoliosis patients who did get surgery after they turned 16 and returned to play sport.

If she allowed herself, she’d get trapped in the tangle of it all. So, for now, she’s choosing not to dwell on it. Eventually, Róisín McCormick knows surgery will be required but hopefully there is a lot more camogie to be played before then.

“I’d say around 30 I’d look to have my surgery. I think my retirement might come a wee bit earlier than I’d want, but if that’s the case, needs must,” she says.

“There are plenty of people dealing with worse, so there’s no point in feeling sorry for yourself. Right now, I’m just grateful to be still playing and looking forward to next season.”

Another year of redefining what is possible.