West Yorkshire League Premier Division
Matt Wright has laid out an ambitious agenda for Robin Hood Athletic as he prepares for next season.
Sixteen points out of a possible 24 at the end of last season has given Wright hope that his South Leeds-based side can upset the applecart and challenge the big guns.
“The club has made a massive push off-the-field,” Wright told Non League Yorkshire.
“It is the club’s 70th birthday and the committee have rebranded the badge.
“There is all-sorts of plans, including strengthening the links with our junior section.
“The chairman is quite progressive and he’s seen the momentum from the end of the season that there’s a real opportunity to jump on the back of that.
“What I won’t have this year is lads leave.
“Some of our players have been approached to go higher but they are happy to stay where they are because they see what we want to do next season.
“That’s ultimately to challenge at the right end of the table and have some cup success.
“Horsforth are the strongest, Beeston are always up there, Carlton will be strong, but I think after that there’s a group of teams wanting to break into the top three and I think we’re one of them.
“It boils down to the buy-in from the players and I think we’ll get it.
“I’m hopeful we can push and let’s see if we can knock on the door of the top part of the league.”
Robin Hood ended up finishing in tenth spot after a troublesome campaign.
Hood were down in the lower reaches until the late revival.
Wright pins the blame on player availability – an issue which affected many Step 7 clubs.
“It was a nightmare,” he said.
“You try to stay positive week-to-week, but now it is finished you look back and think ‘I’m glad it is over’.
“It wasn’t just consigned to us because nearly every club in our league was in the same position in terms of availability.
“I think the only ones who had good availability were the ones right up at the top.
“I’m happy it is over but we had a lot of momentum going into the end of the season as we only lost two.
“Our form picked up and we only lost two and all our players were available.
“We picked up 16 points out of 24 so we finished with real momentum.
“We recently had the presentation night and the togetherness is the best I’ve ever seen it.”
Wright expects the mass availability issues to fade for clubs in the coming months.
“I think it will definitely improve,” he said.
“When people book holidays abroad they are a more structured.
“People save up money for them.
“When those holidays were off the table, you could do weekends away more frequently as the outlay wasn’t as big.
“Going into next season I can only see availability getting better.”
“I told the lads that I wasn’t going to continue doing it like it was going with the availability issues.
“We have never had the problem before.
“I appreciated why it happened because of the pandemic, but we needed it to change and everyone has been good as gold since and the last third of the season shows.”