Community respond to break-in at Saints
St Mirren Women’s football team has been left reeling after thieves broke into a container and stole all of their training and matchday equipment.
Around £2,000 worth of goods were stolen from the storage unit at the club’s Mossedge Village base – with not even a single football left behind.
The incident has rocked the club’s senior team, under-18s and under-16s leaving them having to scramble to get equipment from charities and other clubs to complete the season.
The theft was discovered by Saints head coach Kate Cooper earlier this month.
She’d arrived to pick up footballs for an under16s match when she saw the container open and everything gone from inside.
Items stolen include footballs, club jackets, chairs, a large filming platform on wheels and more.
Part of the criteria for Scottish women’s football clubs is that they’re required to film home games so the loss of the filming platform makes it more difficult for them to fulfil this requirement.
And without dugouts at Mossedge, the chairs were used for substitutes and staff to sit on.
The footballs are blue or yellow Mitre balls stamped with the club’s initials SMWFC.
Kate told the Express: “It feels quite personal – they’ve not touched any of the other containers, it was just ours.
“Everything that’s been taken effectively prevents us functioning as a team.”
Police are currently investigating the theft.
A Police Scotland spokesperson told the Express: “Around 6.20pm on Tuesday, March 5, we received a report of a breakin to a container in Brediland Road, Paisley. Enquiries are ongoing.”
Despite the setback, Saints are looking forward – inspired by the community’s response to the theft – with more than £2,000 donated to the club since the incident two weeks ago.
And St Vincent’s Hospice has chipped in by donating footballs.
Cooper added: “We’re really happy with the response, it’s turned into a nice community story.
“We’ve been overwhelmed with the level of public support that we’ve received in trying to get us back on our feet again.
“We’d really like to thank everybody because we’ve managed to cover most of the costs of everything that was stolen.
“We’re used to having to overcome adversity every day. It’s what we do in women’s and girl’s football.
“We tend to focus on what’s going well and how are we going to react to things rather than what’s not going right.
“We’ve just focused on what can we do to fix it. We just pull our socks up and the community’s helped us with that. They’ve been fantastic.”
The online fundraiser will remain live to allow people to donate.
Kate said: “We’re going to keep the fundraiser up for a little bit because there’s always more stuff that we need so, if anybody wants to give us a bit of extra support, that would be greatly appreciated.”
A link to it is available here: https://bit.ly/3IGI757
We’ve been overwhelmed with the level of public support that we’ve received