heading for 13, and you're never the same person again. And that's being honest. All of a sudden your life just changes. You're weak and you're vulnerable. There's this sense of freefall and trying to make sense of it. All I wanted to do was make things right for my mother and father, to get it back to what it was". A friend of Charles suggested the dead boy would have been "a cert for the county minors". McGuinness took the remark to heart and it proved an important motivation for his later life: "I remember them words and I remember staring at the television, and in that moment saying to myself: 'I'm going to do that. I'm going to do that'. And in that moment my focus became very, very concentrated and I became very aware of the fact that I didn't want anybody else in the room to realise what I was thinking. From that moment on, that's how I started living my life. When I would get in from school at twenty to four — we're just a couple of hundred metres from the school — at quarter to four I'd be running down the road or on the bike and I'd be in the pitch, particularly in the wintertime because you'd only have maybe 45 minutes of light. It just became a big, big part of my life". McGuinness's boyhood hero was Jack O'Shea. Playing career McGuinness was called up to the county minors in 1990. In early 1992, he sufficiently impressed senior county manager Brian McEniff in a trial game in Ballyshannon to earn a call-up to the squad. As a "scraggly-haired teen", McGuinness observed from the bench McEniff's team defeated Derry in the final of the Ulster Senior Football Championship before going on to win the All-Ireland Senior Football Championship. McGuinness was also a star of Third-Level Colleges football, winning Sigerson Cups with Tralee in 1998 and 1999 as captain, and again as captain in 2001 with the University of Ulster at Jordanstown (UUJ). At Tralee he studied health and leisure. He played club football with Naomh Conaill, winning a Donegal Senior Football Championship in 2005. With Ireland, he played in the 1998 International Rules Series. He also played for Donegal Boston. After Donegal lost the final of the 1998 Ulster Senior Football Championship, Jim McGuinness — aged 25 at this time — decided