MEET OUR TEAM
Gary Keegan - CEO & Founder
Gary has spent most of his career immersed in high performance across a range of competitive business and sporting settings. As former Director of the Irish Institute of Sport and former High Performance Director with the IABA’s High Performance Boxing Programme, Gary was a driving force behind previously unseen success for Irish teams and athletes on European, World and Olympic stages. Today, Gary sits on the IRFU National Professional Games Board and Chairs Cricket Ireland’s High Performance Advisory Group.
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Outside of the sporting arena, Gary works with organisations, business leaders and executive teams, helping them to develop the same culture of winning that he has achieved with Olympians, professional sports teams and world champions. Gary also guest lectures on high performance, systems, vision and strategy at the London Business School and at the Irish Management Institute.
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From the boxing ring to the boardroom, Gary’s unique thinking on high performance has inspired a culture of excellence in execution that is at the foundation of what Uppercut do. We continue to support, and to learn from, our valued clients for whom we will always be in their corner.
Graham Shaw - Lead Consultant
Graham has spent over two decades leading and coaching high-performance teams on the world stage.
He is one of Ireland’s most decorated hockey players winning multiple All Irelands and European titles over two decades. Graham has worked as an international hockey coach for the past 13 years coaching and leading teams at European, World and Olympic level. His most notable achievement was leading the Ireland women’s team to a World Cup final in 2018. This achievement earned him the prestigious RTÉ ‘Manager of the Year’ award. More recently Graham has been living in New Zealand where he led the New Zealand hockey team to the Tokyo Olympic Games.
Graham’s intimate knowledge of what it takes to lead high performance teams and cultivate winning cultures including the challenges that entails, makes him an ideal fit for the work Uppercut do to support Business leaders and leadership teams maximise performance.
Uppercut, led by Gary Keegan, works in close partnership with leading CEOs, leadership teams, top athletes, and leading sports organisations on high performance, winning cultures, leadership performance.
Nicola Jordan - Team Operations Coordinator
From a specialist training & development background, with over 20 years experience, Nicola is a resourceful, professional, highly motivated and organised person.
Nicola's role at Uppercut is to provide and maintain our high standard of support to our clients. She supports our consultants throughout each project on all aspects of Learning & Development
Passionate about getting the job done right first time, Nicola ensures that the outcomes of our work for clients feeds into new research, methodologies, processes, and approaches to keep Uppercut at the forefront of high performance consultancy and practice.