East Kilbride Thistle boss Iain Diack wasn’t surprised when the West of Scotland League was declared null and void, but the club aren’t standing still.
Diack himself is on the verge of signing a new contract, and he hopes that prompts a snowball effect from his players.
While veteran striker Scott Davidson will be moving on, the club have set up a youth pathway, and centre-half Tony Kerr will be stepping up from their Colts team.
Thistle are also moving forward with plans to raise their pitch to fix a drainage problem, and Diack says it’s all positive.
On his own deal, Diack said: “I don’t think it’s that far away, we’ve been speaking over the last few weeks and it’s not going to be that difficult, just a couple of wee things here and there.
“Once that’s done we’ll look to get players sorted ; I think it will be good to see that I’m committing myself to the club and then we can all go in 100 per cent together.
“I’ve been sitting down with my coaches in the last week, assessing our squad and seeing what we think we need.
“It’s about ear-marking those types of players that we want to bring in, but obviously we don’t have any money, so we’re not in a privileged position where we can say ‘we like him, let’s go and get him’.
“We have the nucleus of a decent squad there, I think, for what we have, it’s probably about adding to that, in the front areas.
“We have one player coming up from the Colts team in Tony Kerr, who has been very impressive at centre-half.
“He’s big, athletic, good on the ball, so he will come in and that will reinforce our defensive needs.
“After that, a lot of it will be assessing our squad, seeing who we want to keep, who wants to stay, and we’ll take it from there.”
Diack is looking to achieve a more professional outlook at Thistle, and says his ideas have been well received by the committee.
“We’re looking to bring the whole stand of it up,” he said. “We’re working hard to get a youth set-up started and things like that, so we have that conveyor belt of young talent.
“That’s the identity that we want, young players to come here and see it as an opportunity, use it as a platform to maybe move on with their own careers.
“I think we have five or six youth teams signed up now for the ages for 2012s all the way to 2005s, so the oldest group is 19s, and that’s the age when you’re looking for boys to push on into the first team.
“When I first came in I wanted to try and create a pathway, because when you don’t have money you need to source players in other ways.
“We’ve now made a start, it will be done professionally, and I think once teams see how we’re going about it we’ll get boys’ club teams who will move them over and become EK Thistle teams. That’s what we’re hoping for.”
Diack wasn’t surprised to see the season being declared null and void and says it would have been difficult to complete the season.
He said: “I was disappointed, because you want to get back to some kind of normality and to try and get games played, but it was probably the right decision.
“Our league would have been fine, I think we would have got finished no problem because we only had nine games or something, but I think the other leagues would have struggled.
“That would have ran in almost to next season, you wouldn’t have had a pre-season, you wouldn’t have any preparation time for the next season so I think it was probably the best solution at the minute.
“With things continuing to improve, hopefully we can get a good summer behind us.
"Hopefully things keep going the way they’re going, and we can just get back to football as we know it, back to dressing rooms and just the way we’ve come to miss.”
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