A “vibrant social scene” is the unique selling point to prospective Headingley AFC players, according to joint manager Matt Fryer.
The West Yorkshire League Premier Division club are situated right in the heart of student life in Leeds, with many of the city’s most popular pubs and nightclubs nearby.
Headingley, the West Riding County FA’s grassroots club of the year for 2020 following their fundraising work with charity Gambling With Lives in memory of player Lewis Keogh, celebrate their 20th anniversary this year and Fryer told Non League Yorkshire that the social aspect is integral to the club’s ethos.
“The players pay to play for us, we’ve never paid anyone apart from as a joke to someone at an end of season party once,” quipped Fryer.
“So we don’t have that luxury so what we try and sell is the experience.
“We also have a slight advantage over clubs in the Division above (NCEL Division One) in that there is slightly less travelling and fewer midweek games so there is less commitment than there is at semi-professional clubs.
“The experience is the really vibrant social scene – when we can have one!
“We have a great bunch of lads who are tight knit and we’re quite unique in the fact that a lot of the guys aren’t actually from Leeds. A lot of them have come to Leeds for university or work.
“We get lads who want to meet new people and we kind of carry on the university spirit where you play on a Wednesday afternoon and go out afterwards. We keep a lot of that alive.
“Although we take the football very seriously, going out in Headingley after a game on a Saturday is still part of things.
“The location definitely helps. One of the first things we do when new people come to the club is a Otley run (pub crawl) at the start of the season or at the end of pre-season.
“We have a big Christmas party at the Skyrack and we do a big end of season awards party. A ridiculous amount of work goes into that. They are always amazing nights.
“You do need to be a good player (to join us), but beyond that we’re looking for people who fit in with the club and the culture.
“They have to be people who thrown themselves into everything the club does, not just on-the-pitch.”
Fryer runs the club’s first team with co-manager Tom Monkhouse.
The pair have managed to turn Headingley into Premier Division semi-stalwarts, but Fryer admits building a squad can be sometimes difficult each summer.
They have lost players who have returned to their home areas after leaving graduates. Their star striker Ash Austin left in 2019 to join Beeston St Anthony’s. He is now playing for Nostell Miners Welfare in the NCEL.
On the doorstep there is the two very successful university football teams at Leeds Beckett and Leeds University.
The Beckett (formerly Leeds Met) team was famously managed by Brighton boss Graham Potter just over ten years ago and he had many well known Yorkshire-based Non League players play for him such as Chib Chilaka, Andy Cooper and Jason Mycoe.
Ex-Shaw Lane star and current Kettering Town right-back Gary Stohrer and former Garforth Town striker Nick Black are two more recent Non League examples from the post-Potter years at Beckett.
So the university teams are a clear pool for potential new players, but Fryer says it is hard for them to attract them from those sources.
“We do keep in contact with Leeds Beckett University and Leeds University,” he said.
“It can be a little tricky as a lot of the better players are getting paid to play in the NCEL on a Saturday.
“But most of the players who come to us have been to one of the universities and have played for one of the teams.
“We usually tend to get them after they have graduated if they are staying in Leeds.
“That’s definitely an angle for us as we don’t have our youth set-up. It feels every year we are always trying to recruit three or four players because we don’t have 18 or 19-year-olds ready to step in.
“So most of the new players are university graduates.”
Headingley are preparing for a mid-August start in what is their fifth year in the Premier Division.
The club have enjoyed an almost meteoric rise in their 20 years as a club.
Despite living a nomadic existence before settling down at the University of Leeds’ Sports Park Weetwood, they have risen to the top of the amateur game (Step 7).
Facilities prevent a sensational jump into Non League Football, but according to Fryer the club remains “ambitious” and is plotting to be the top side in the West Yorkshire League.
“We’re quite a young club,” he said.
“We started in 2001 so this will be our 20th season as a club and that’s including being called Skyrack FC and playing in the (defunct) Leeds Red Triangle League.
“We’re not quite as established as say Beeston, who are celebrating their centenary this year, and some of the other clubs we come up against.
“They’ve been in the league a long time and have been successful at this level for a long time.
“Even though we have been at this level for a while we do still feel a bit fresh to it.
“I think it is a big achievement that we have able to establish ourselves in the Premier, but it is not something we are satisfied with.
“We have probably got where we have got because the club has always been ambitious and had ambitious people around it.
“We look at Ilkley and maybe moving up is something that is not realistic at the moment in terms of facilities, but we look at some of these other clubs and think that we want to be the best amateur team in the area.
“It is difficult, but we’re ambitious to say we don’t want to just stay in the league, we want to try and win it.
“We don’t think we are far away. If we can those players with extra quality this summer and we can get off to a good start we think can really surprised a few teams.
“We’ve mentioned the social side, but we’re really looking to step up on the football side of things this year.
“Myself and Tom have been doing the job for three seasons in terms of managing the first team.
“We feel when we are playing we’ll give anyone a match at this level.
“We’ve been inconsistent at times. We’ll be good for 70 minutes and make a couple of sloppy mistakes.
“I think if we can have a good start to the season and get a couple of wins early on I feel we could be really up there as we’ve shown it in glimpses. We’ve just not shown the consistency.”
If you have enjoyed reading Non League Yorkshire over the past few months, please consider making a donation to the not-for-profit organisation NLY Community Sport which provides sport for children and adults with disabilities and learning difficulties. CLICK HERE to visit the JustGiving page. There is a video at the bottom of the page showing our work.
NLY Community Sport, run by James Grayson and Connor Rollinson, has always had combatting social isolation at the top of our objectives when running our Disability Football teams.
Our work is playing an important role in reintroducing our players, who have disabilities and learning difficulties, back into society.
We have six teams, a mixture of Junior and Adult teams – Nostell MW DFC, Pontefract Pirates, Selby Disability Football Club and the South Yorkshire Superheroes (Barnsley) – across Yorkshire.
We have enjoyed great success over the past three years. Several of our players have represented Mencap GB in Geneva, including Billy Hobson from Selby and Greg Smith, whose story is quite inspiring.
You can learn more about the organisation HERE and on our Facebook page.
Watch the video below to see highlights from our three years as an organisation. The video was produced for our players at the end of March to remind them of good memories from the last three years.
