Pirates looking to youth:
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Amanda McDonald hopes East Kilbride Pirates will start to reap the benefits of their youth development programme after a season to forget in 2016.
The Pirates chair helped launch their academy in 2010 and now six players, some of whom joined the club at the age of 14, are set to make the step up to the senior squad for the forthcoming campaign, which kicks-off on April 29.
Last season Pirates missed out on the league title for the first time in seven years and missed out on the BritBowl play-offs.
They are desperate to get back to winning ways in 2017 and Amanda hopes an influx of new talent can help them return to the summit of the Northern Conference.
She told the News: “Last year we lost a lot of experienced players and in the last couple of months of the season we managed to rally to take third place, so we were not too disappointed. We always knew it would be a tough season.
“The emphasis has been on playing the long game and bringing juniors through from the youth programme.
“This season we will start to see the benefits of that with six players coming into the first team this year, which I think will help us a lot.
“There is a big difference between taking on a rookie who turned out for tryouts this year and bringing in someone who has been with the programme for a few years. They know our language and training methods, so it’s an easier transition.
“It’s been great to watch our youngsters grow and develop into members of the first team. We are hopeful they will hit the ground running and I’d like to think we will now see the number of players making the step up increasing each year.”
Experienced stars Iain Dick, Blair McTague, Jamie McIntosh and Jamie McLaughlin have retired leaving big gaps to be filled. But head coach Ross Templeton remains in place and the Pirates can boast 10 local players in this season’s roster.
Neil Baptie, Dougie Meechan, Andrew Meechan, Iain McFarlane, Andrew Prentice, Steven Williamson and Gordon Wallace all return, while juniors Aaron Callaghan, Gavin Russell join rookie Andrew Shaw.
With the fixtures for the season recently released, East Kilbride have learned they will kick-off their title challenge at home to newly promoted Edinburgh Wolves.
It will be the first time in fours years the club have faced a fellow Scottish side and Amanda added: “Edinburgh Wolves are a strong team who have been growing on and off the field to get to this level, so it is a tough opening game for us.
“But it’s exciting to have a ‘local’ fixture again. It’s one more week where we don’t have to travel six hours on a bus to play a game. Everyone is looking forward to it.
“It’s too early to speculate on the season we may have. We’ll need to see all the teams in action first.
“It has really become a Premier Division now, it will be so competitive for promotion and relegation.
“We had a bit of wobble at the start of last season and it took us until later on for things to click into place.
“Our overall levels are up and we go into our training camp at Strathallan excited for the season ahead.”