The season marks the first year in which Pontefract Collieries has an affiliated Women’s football team, and they will compete in the WBL in 2022/23. The women’s team began training back in 2021 and have quickly come together and played in a number of friendlies together.
They will now embark on their first competitive game this weekend, as The Cougars are at home to Featherstone Academical this Sunday at Aspire @ The Park (3pm Kick Off). We caught up with Head Coach and Head of Women’s/Girl’s Football at The Colls (Dave Hotchkiss) to discuss their start and the teams impact moving forward…
Dave welcome, your season opener is almost upon us. How exciting is it for you and the ladies to be getting underway as a team?
It’s been a long time coming and the ladies can’t wait to get started! We began training sessions way back in November 2021, played our first friendly in March and have been building all aspects of the team ever since.
I think our first training session consisted of 12 ladies, some of who had never kicked a ball in anger, but they’ve all shown a lot of dedication to be ready for their first game in the WBL at the weekend.
We now have a squad of 28 with some real talented footballers in there, and we want to keep growing so we can have multiple teams across multiple divisions in the coming years.
A first full season for the ladies, what are your hopes for the season?
We want to compete with anyone we play. We know we are at the very beginning of our journey for open age women’s football, but we are already building a reputation as a good footballing team and have received a lot of praise for how we operate both on and off the pitch.
This team is about developing women’s opportunities to get into football no matter what your age or ability, and true to our Coll’s motto we want “football for all” so in future seasons we can have teams playing across multiple standards of league that suit the level of anyone who wants to play.
As head of Womens Football, how important for the club is having a successful Womens team for our girls teams?
Interestingly enough a good number of our players are mums of our junior players across our girls and boys teams, and many of them would say their kids have inspired them to play the game, but now it’s turned on it’s head to some extent!
Our girls and their parents are looking up and realising that they can continue their football journey with the club beyond their junior years, and given some of the talented players we’re producing across those ‘all female’ junior teams there is every possibility that we could build a really strong open age team over the next few seasons to compliment the beginner level teams we have built so far.
Hopefully that can then inspire the next group of girls to come through and help us build towards having not just a strong senior women’s side, but quality teams right through the female pathway we’re developing at the club.