Yeovil building fresh foundations for the future
Katie Whyatt finds a new determination at former top-tier club battling back from the brink of collapse
Yeovil are not like most clubs in the Women’s National League Southern Premier Division, the third tier of women’s football. This time last year, they were in the top flight, with the fifth-highest average home crowds in the Women’s Super League. Seven months ago, they were relegated two divisions. They are grateful to be here at all.
For two seasons, Yeovil competed in the top tier. In 2017, the Football Association announced plans to convert the WSL into a fully professional league. With no financial support from their men’s team, Yeovil’s place felt touch and go – but their application was successful.
On Mar 28 last year, Yeovil were handed a 10-point deduction after they had informed the FA of their initial intention to appoint an administrator. That all but guaranteed relegation. Job cuts, plus a cash advance from the governing body, meant administrators were never formally appointed, but the damage was done. They bid for a Championship licence for 2019-20 and reverted to part-time. The FA rejected their proposal; the club fell two divisions. The only silver lining to Yeovil’s annus horribilis is that Jamie Sherwood, under whom they won promotion to the top division in 2016, has returned as head coach, having left as the club turned professional.
“I have a wife, three children,” he reflects, two years on. “Yeovil gave me four great years, but sometimes
I wasn’t a husband or father as best as I should have been. The balance was at a tipping point, and my family came first. It was the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make.”
That shift to professional football meant others left. Ellie Curson spent four months balancing full-time football with teacher training. “I remember thinking, ‘I can’t do this’ – I didn’t have a life,” she reflects. “They gave me an ultimatum, offered me a full-time contract, accommodation. But a starting teaching wage was a lot further up the money aspect than taking the full-time contract at Yeovil. The financial backing and the accommodation they were offering wasn’t really suitable. It wasn’t enough. I wouldn’t have been able to live very much. That made me think, ‘I need more than this.’ ”
Some took the jump. Ann-Marie Heatherson, Yeovil’s captain, left her job working with children with behavioural difficulties. “At 35, I’d played professionally in Iceland and America,” she says. “The one country I wanted to be professional in was England. It was an easy decision. I just didn’t realise it would be short-lived.
“We should have folded probably around Christmas, but the sponsor we had decided to help us. You think, we’re OK – all we’ve got to do is go down a league. Other people who wanted to stay professional knew they were going to change clubs.”
She says the FA’s rejection of their tier-two application was “the most depressing part of my life. It’s hard to think my career will probably end now in the lower levels.” Finding a new job, she says, was “the least of my worries. My first worry was the psychological stuff. Who am I now if I don’t have football? Where’s my life going? I’m still slightly struggling with it. Playing at this level when I’m probably a little bit too good for it is quite an anxious thing, because there’s quite a lot of pressure on me.”
Sherwood was unable to make his first training session back because a pupil at the Cardiff-based college at which he works smashed his windscreen with a football. Since November, he has been driving the two hours to Dorchester, where the newly formed Yeovil Women train.
He had previously spent four years of his life driving 600 miles a week to coach them. He knew what it would mean to the region were Yeovil to disappear. “Anywhere from Land’s End to Somerset, there was no big [women’s football] representation,” he says. “People of that area need sport, need teams that chase their dreams.
“It was nothing to do with the board being too ambitious; it was that we were 12 to 18 months ahead of schedule. The changes that happened were unforeseen. They’re painful times. It took its toll on a lot of people.”
Yeovil were rescued from collapse by businessman Adam Murry, who, in 2008, led Bournemouth’s rescue when they were bottom of League Two, in administration, on –17 points. “I think he likes the story of the underdog,” Sherwood says. “The long term [aim] is to re-establish the club in the top tiers of women’s football.”
Sherwood – who holds a Uefa A licence having begun his coaching qualifications aged 18 when a knee injury ended his playing days – left a job with Barry Town’s youth team to return. “I’ve always called it my touchline and it’s my home,” he says. “It’s like putting on an old pair of slippers you just love, but it’s not just going home. It’s going home and going, ‘Can we build an extension on our house, redecorate the front room?’”