At the start of this month, Fergal Quinn secured his card on the World Snooker Tour (WST) for the first time.
He had first attempted to compete with the elite back in 2018 and, by getting through Q School, he ensured he would be the sixth player from Ireland to compete on the tour this season.
And it’ll be a fast start for the Dublin-born Tyrone man, with Wuhan Open and British Open qualifiers to come on Monday and Thursday against Thepchaiya Un-Noo and Gao Yang respectively. Those matches take place in Leicester.
It’s a crossroads in his career, but it was a point that even six months ago he thought he might never reach.
“It’s been a lot of life experience,” he tells RTÉ Sport when asked what changed at Q School this year, after so many failed attempts.
“The more pain you go through, it makes you stronger. If you can handle life’s challenges, it makes a game of snooker a touch easier, the pressure side of it.
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“I handle myself a lot better now, I’m more self-confident. I’ve more belief in myself that I do deserve this. I earned this place to become a professional and I belong here.
“All those sorts of things – when you’re younger – you can self-sabotage a lot. I said to myself, ‘I want this now, I’m going to go for it and nothing is going to stop me.'”
Quinn grew up between Cookstown and Coalisland in county Tyrone, but he’s recently relocated to Sheffield.
The city hosts the World Championships every spring at the iconic Crucible Theatre but it’s also home to some of the best snooker academies anywhere in the world.
The 25-year-old is set up at the Victoria’s Snooker Academy, barely a 10-minute walk from the game’s Mecca on Tudor Square, and the practice base for recently crowned world champion Zhao Xintong.
“No better place to be,” as Quinn puts it himself.
Speaking immediately after coming off the table when he beat Dean Young to secure his tour card, he admitted that his future may have lay away from the game had he come up short again.
It was a run to the WSF World Amateur Championship semi-finals in Morocco in January that gave him the hope to keep going.
“One afternoon I was going to walk away from it,” he adds, taking up the story.
“Then I got to the world semis, and that got me a wild card into the World Snooker Championship qualifiers in April.
“I could then say to myself that for the next few months, I was simplifying my life and being a snooker player. I lost in the first Q School event, but I was able to shut out everything for the second one.
“I was genuinely going to walk away from the game for a good period of time and I didn’t know if I was going to come back.
“There is so much pressure because you’re playing for so much. The only way I found that I could deal with the pressure was to put myself in a state of mind where I wanted to win so badly, I was able to block everything out. I fought for every frame and it carried me through it.
Fergal Quinn says he’s hoping to win a match early in his career to help him settle
“I ended up winning the five matches 4-1 and it was because I was so determined. I didn’t want to lose frames or let the matches go close.
“If they go close it’s more pressure and anything can happen. You don’t want to rely on luck, you want to keep it in your own hands as much as possible.
“So it’s probably a testament to how well I was playing at the time that I didn’t allow any of the top players to get close.
“That moment of victory has got over 2.5 million views on WST’s social channels, I just let out a big roar! It was pure relief; I’ve got close so many times and I’ve got so many scars.
“There can be traumatic defeats in sport, psychologically speaking, so to finally get over the line was a massive relief.”
Quinn has taken the long road and it means he’s certainly not getting ahead of himself.
He has two years guaranteed on the tour but he’s aware of just how tough the elite level of the tour can be.
“I’d like to get my first win under my belt as soon as possible,” he says of his immediate aims.
“It settles you and relaxes you into it. Ideally if I could win a few of these early games and qualify for China, then I could get out there and experience all that.
“The more tournaments I can qualify for, get to the latter stages of, playing in front of crowds and TV cameras, the better it’s going to suit me in the long term.
“For every first time professional, the goal at the end of the two years is to get into the top 64 and stay on the tour.
“That’s very hard and it’s not really expected for me to do that, but that has to be the first goal.
“If I could get a deep run in one of them, that’d be amazing, so I have to take it as it comes and keep everything off the table in a good routine and do all the right things.
“Hopefully the results will then show on the table. It’s very exciting to see what the next few years have to offer.”
