Chairman's Diary: Great to see young Warriors back in action

Happy parents were escorting their kids to the entrance and waving them off to play once again. At last, there was a feeling of some normality. Obviously things aren’t fully back to normal as we are working in reduced groups with lots of social distance and hygiene measures in place. However, that takes nothing away from the joy at hearing the shouts from the small sided training and games taking place.

I’d like to thank the parents of our young community participants for their patience and understanding throughout this difficult period, and I’d also praise our hard working team at the club who have put a huge amount of time into drawing up the various plans and risk assessments and are at times carrying out their tasks in full PPE including gloves, masks and visors. We’ve got football back and it has been a community effort as always.

The support that we have had from fans and the community continues to be of vital importance. We launched our season ticket sales last week and the initial uptake has been very encouraging. We’ll have a shorter season so we’ve discounted the ticket price and we hope this will help encourage sales.

We’ve also now launched our ‘Take Your Seat’ project. We had been looking at a full seat replacement for our main stand for some time but initially thought that COVID-19 might have derailed our plans. However, we took the decision to proceed with this and launched this project last week. The existing seats at Ochilview have been in place for 25 years, so change was overdue.

We are offering supporters the chance to sponsor a seat which will all ow them to put their name, dedication or message on it. We’re delighted to have had a great initial uptake of this offer and we would hope to have as many seats sponsored as possible. Visually, it will be great to see the stand transformed with the new seats in place later this year.

If we all continue to follow the Government advice on social distancing and regular hand washing, hopefully we’ll see more parts of society returning to normal too.