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While Conor McGregor’s win against Dennis Siver attracted most of the publicity from that night in Boston, it was also very satisfying to see Paddy Holohan return to winning ways. Having lost for the first time in his career in his previous bout, Paddy was eager to get back in there again as quickly as possible in order to right the wrongs from his defeat to Chris Kelades in October 2014.

Paddy didn’t perform as well as he’s capable of against Kelades, but we still extracted positives from it. Perhaps the main one for me was that Paddy, having been unbeaten in his first eleven professional contests, now knew what it was like to lose. Nothing illustrates the value of winning quite like a loss. That’s not to say that Paddy didn’t fully appreciate the taste of victory until that point, but it certainly left him more motivated and focused than he had ever been before. That manifested itself in a superb performance against Shane Howell in Boston.

It was an exciting time in Paddy’s life. He was finally competing – and winning – in the UFC, which had always been his aim, but there was also something else on the horizon that was perhaps even more important to him.

Within a year of opening the new gym on the Naas Road, membership had grown to the point where it was already time to think about expansion. We would end 2015 with 700 members. I was interested in the idea of opening a second premises in Dublin, and we agreed that Paddy would spearhead the project. At the time of writing it’s still a work in progress, but we hope SBG Tallaght will be up and running before the end of 2016.

Paddy is a proud native of Tallaght, so to be in a position to open a gym there meant the world to him. He still has many years of fighting at the highest level left in him, but it’s been clear to me for a long time that Paddy will also go on to become a very good coach – a process he has already begun with us at SBG. I believe people are either born to teach or not. Paddy has got what it takes.

Owen Roddy has got it too. Paddy is still an active fighter, so he’s balancing both commitments for now, whereas Owen has already retired from fighting, so coaching is his sole focus. As Conor McGregor’s striking coach, Owen is deservedly beginning to receive a lot of recognition. In my opinion, he’s way ahead of the majority of his peers in terms of what he’s doing. Both Owen and Paddy will be successful coaches for a long time to come.

In order to be a successful coach, you require first and foremost the ability to communicate effectively with a wide variety of personalities. More often than not, the biggest mistakes I see coaches making can be traced back to communication. Some coaches may have been great fighters and they might find it difficult to comprehend that their students are unable to do things the way they could. The student may simply have a different style, but a coach might insist on forcing their way on to everybody.

You need to be able to adapt. I believe I’m quite flexible: I can work with different personalities and styles. When it comes to high-level athletes, you often encounter big egos, so you need to find a way to communicate your ideas in a manner that suits them.

Patience is also vital. If you’re a strength and conditioning coach, for example, you might have an image in your head of coaching a bunch of Olympic athletes. However, the reality is that most of your clients will probably be Joe Soaps who are just trying to stay fit and healthy. The point is that you must be patient when you’re teaching people with different levels of skill and competence. Not everybody is going to turn out to be a UFC-level fighter.

If you’re only pretending to enjoy coaching, people will see through that very quickly. You either love and embrace it or you don’t. There’s no middle ground. If you open a gym solely to make money, it’ll be destined to fail. You need to be able to appreciate the thrill of what I call the ‘wow moment’ – when you explain to somebody how a certain technique works and their eyes light up after they manage to put it into practice. Moments like that probably give me more satisfaction than a big UFC win for one of my fighters.

Some athletes insist on training with a coach who also had a successful career as a fighter. Others just want to know that the coach has the ability to demonstrate to them what they need to do to keep improving. Take Greg Jackson in New Mexico, for example. He’s regarded as one of the best coaches in the game – and he was never a fighter himself.

Ultimate success or failure depends on the athlete in question, of course, irrespective of the coach’s record in the octagon, and I believe it’s probably a sign of immaturity and lack of self-confidence when someone wants to be trained only by a coach who was a great fighter too.

As a coach, you also have to be prepared to put up with a lot of shit. You’re constantly dealing with narky fighters who are trying to make weight while arguing with their girlfriends, teammates and seemingly everyone in their lives. In my case, you’re also often semi-managing their careers. From the outside, people might see me as a guy holding pads or shouting at someone to do five more reps, but it’s certainly much more complicated than that.

Taking the helicopter view is essential. You need to rise above everything and see what your fighters don’t, that a certain sparring partner or perhaps a nutritionist needs to be brought in, for example. There are many layers involved and they’re being added to all the time. I’m still learning myself. No matter how long I remain a coach, that journey of education will never end.

With people like Paddy Holohan and Owen Roddy, I can only hope that I have inspired them in the same way that coaches like Kieran McGeeney, Eoin Lacey and John Connor have influenced me. All three of those guys have taught me so much from their own experiences about striving for the highest standards.

Eoin and John run the Irish Strength Institute in Dublin, and they’ve been working with my fighters on strength and conditioning since 2009. Kieran first came to SBG in 2009, when he was the manager of the Kildare football team. He brought the Kildare players in – out of curiosity as much as anything else – to do some Brazilian jiu-jitsu as part of their pre-season training. Seven years later, Kieran isn’t just a member at SBG, but he’s also one of our BJJ coaches. He competed at the highest level of his own sport for years and I’ve learned so much from him about having a competitive mindset. Kieran is obsessive regarding the pursuit of success and perfection. He’s been a massive influence for me.

I’ve often been told that I have a methodical approach to coaching, in that everything is broken down concisely into parts. Cathal Pendred likened me to his school rugby coach, who was also a maths teacher. It may not be a complete coincidence that, if I had been forced to use my engineering degree to earn a living, I probably would have looked into teaching maths. People sometimes assume that my coaching methods stem from my academic background in engineering, but I think it’s a reflection more of my personality than of my education. Even though it was my mother who pushed me in the direction of the engineering course in DIT, I had the right kind of personality to be enthusiastic about it.

In college, I always loved working in the labs because there was a rational and logical pattern to everything we did – A led to B, B led to C and so on. Following a set of steps in order to reach a definitive solution, basically. That’s why maths and science always appealed to me in school more than other subjects. It wasn’t like English, where you might be asked for your opinion on Macbeth. I hated that. I just didn’t see the point in me, some random teenager in a school in Dublin, trying to come up with something more interesting to say about Macbeth than the best English teachers and scholars already had. We used to get sample answers in our textbooks which were only to be used as a guide, but I just learned them off by heart and used them word-for-word. Trying to come up with some forced opinion just seemed like bullshit to me.

With maths, however, there was just one right answer and it was up to you to work it out. There was no doubt or uncertainty. If you couldn’t find the one correct answer, you were just wrong. Follow the steps that have been explained to you and you’ll find that right answer. I think you can apply that to sequences in grappling and striking too. It’s not magic. For the vast majority of the time, there are only a limited number of positions you can find yourself in so you can work on deducing the right responses to those. That’s the role of a coach; to ensure that the athlete has the right answers to the most common positions. Then it’s up to the athlete to find the area in which they particularly want to express themselves. I want my guys to be rock-solid in the over-under clinch hold, the double-leg and single-leg takedown and on how to throw a jab. After they have that foundation, their personalities will lead them to specific styles of fighting.

After Conor McGregor’s defeat of Dennis Siver, I was inundated for days with social media messages from fans who were planning to attend the title bout against José Aldo. There had been some idle talk about the fight taking place at Croke Park in Dublin, but I felt then – as I still do now – that the prospect of a UFC event there was unlikely. All the indications were pointing to Las Vegas and speculation in the media suggested that UFC 187, on 23 May, would be the date. However, what we were hearing behind the scenes was that the fight was being lined up for UFC 189 instead. Fans were so keen to be there to see Conor become the first Irishman to challenge for a UFC title that they went ahead and booked their flights and hotels for Vegas for the May date. They were even tweeting screenshots of their bookings to me.

A week or so after the Siver fight, I mentioned in a radio interview with Newstalk in Ireland – another one where the presenters seemed surprised that I wasn’t bigger and scarier-looking when I came into the studio – that nothing had been confirmed as regards a date for the fight, so fans should not take the risk by booking. But some were unable to contain themselves, and I’m sure it unfortunately cost them a bit of money. Just a few days later, the UFC confirmed that José Aldo would defend his UFC featherweight title against Conor McGregor at UFC 189 at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas on 11 July.

Another subject of fascination for the fans was Conor’s earnings. People asked if I was worried that the money would go to his head and distract him from the task at hand. Will he start to slacken off now that he’s rolling in the cash? Will you lose him to that?

I’m sure that has happened on countless occasions in the past to athletes in many sports, but I had known Conor for long enough to realize that this wasn’t a concern for us. Sure, now that he was earning the kind of money he could once only have dreamed of, he was certainly making the most of it. But Conor is astute enough to recognize that it could all disappear in an instant if he were to take his eye off the ball. Ultimately it comes down to what motivates you. If money is your only incentive, your determination to succeed in competition will fade as soon as you start admiring your bank account. Conor has stated publicly that money is a motivating factor for him, but only because it happens to be a consequence of learning, improving, competing and winning – which is what drives him, first and foremost. If an athlete is motivated solely by money, they’ll come unstuck as soon as they start to make it in large amounts. It’s happened many times before. Mike Tyson wanted money and fame, but he was never the same soon after he began to experience it. Some people said his decline was a result of the death of his coach, Cus D’Amato, but for me the problem seemed to be a lack of motivation.

Another question I’ve sometimes been asked is whether Conor will eventually leave SBG and join one of the big teams in America.

It’s not something I’ve ever worried about. Conor places a lot of importance on loyalty, but even more so it’s about intelligence. The relationship between a coach and a fighter does not develop overnight, and Conor knows that. As a younger fighter, with his boxing background, he has a lot of friends who would have travelled to places like the Wild Card Boxing Club in Los Angeles over the years. When you go to a place like that as a newcomer, you join the back of the queue for the attention of the coaches. That’s also quite true for new fighters who join us at SBG. They’re welcome, of course, but they’ll need to work hard to move their way up the pecking order and prove that they’re serious about becoming a permanent member of the team. I’m not going to compromise the time and effort I put into fighters who have trained under me from day one for somebody who could be gone again in a few months. If a professional fighter leaves their own team to join SBG, I have to wonder how long it will be before they decide to depart SBG for somewhere else? Particularly in recent years, we’ve had high-level fighters come to the gym to train from every corner of the world. The door is open to them and they’ll be greeted warmly, but it’ll take some time to build up the trust that’s required to consider them as part of the team.

Conor saw that I gave him everything I had from the moment he first walked through the door, and he gave me everything in return. We rose up together and it has paid off for us both. If Conor had left to become just another sparring partner in some gym in America with a hundred professional fighters, I don’t believe he would have been able to develop in the manner that he has.

Just from a practical point of view, Conor’s timekeeping is so bad that it probably wouldn’t have worked for him anywhere else! If you’re in a big US gym and you miss the 1.30 p.m. team session, that’s your problem. And that’s pretty much the crack of dawn in Conor McGregor’s time zone. I’ve learned that’s just how he is, and I do whatever I can to accommodate him. He has his own key to the gym and often comes in to train after midnight.

Conor’s title shot against José Aldo was being billed as the biggest fight in the UFC’s history, as evidenced by the organization’s decision to embark on a twelve-day media world tour in March 2015, with both fighters in tow. Beginning in Rio de Janeiro and ending in Dublin, the tour would take in ten cities across Brazil, the USA, Canada, the UK and Ireland. One of my first thoughts was that I felt slightly sorry for José Aldo, having to endure being tormented by Conor every day for nearly two weeks, but it sounded like a lot of fun for the fans and it was an indication of how important the fight was for the UFC. This was something they had never done before.

When Conor got in Aldo’s face after the Siver fight in Boston, Aldo didn’t seem too bothered. But over the course of the media tour, Conor poked and prodded, chipping away at Aldo. It was clear that Aldo wasn’t enjoying himself. On the set of a TV show, Conor grabbed Aldo’s neck and snatched his belt while it was unattended. Aldo’s coach, André Pederneiras – asked Dana White to make sure that Conor didn’t make physical contact with the champion. As soon as Conor found that out, he was never going to be able to resist.

The fighters had a hectic schedule over the course of the media tour, but I wasn’t concerned about it placing too much stress and strain on Conor, especially as the fight was still nearly four months away. He had Artem Lobov with him along the way, so they were training as they travelled. We’ve learned over the years that there’s always time to train, even if that involves moving the beds aside in a hotel room to create sufficient space for a session.

We also have to allow for the promotional requirements of the game. For Conor, in particular, it’s an area in which he feels like he can gain an advantage. Is it the difference between winning and losing? I don’t believe so. Conor has more than enough physical skills to beat his opponents without putting them under psychological pressure first. Still, it doesn’t do any harm. I knew that being in Conor’s company for that amount of time would wear on Aldo.

John, bad news. Can you take a phone call?

My stomach started doing somersaults when I read Artem’s message. He and Conor were in Canada for the final North American leg of the UFC 189 media tour, before it made its way across the Atlantic Ocean for stops in London and Dublin.

When I got Artem on the phone, he told me news I didn’t want to hear: ‘Conor has hurt his knee.’

Artem explained that Conor and Rory MacDonald – a Canadian welterweight who was scheduled to take on the champion, Robbie Lawler, in UFC 189 – had been training together that afternoon. Nothing strenuous, just a bit of grappling. But during their session, Rory landed awkwardly on Conor’s left knee – the same knee he had injured against Max Holloway. The knee was already swelling up and Conor was having it looked at by a medic. I was almost afraid to pose the question out of fear that I’d inevitably receive an unpleasant answer. But I needed to know.

‘Artem, how bad is it?’

‘I’m not going to lie,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t look good.’