Inverness Caledonian Thistle manager says National league should drive standards up
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Inverness Caledonian Thistle Women manager Karen Mason believes moving to a national Championship division will increase the standard of the league.
Moving from a regionalised north and south Championship to a national one has been in the works for years, and this week Scottish Women’s Football confirmed that it would be introduced for the 2022/23 campaign.
Previously, both regionalised leagues had a big disparity in the quality of teams, with occasional scorelines reaching double figures nothing to bat an eyelid at.
However, with the best of the teams in the north and south joining together, in theory standards should only get higher on and off the pitch.
To be eligible for the national Championship, teams must meet a range of criteria affecting their behind-the-scenes set-up.
Clubs have had several years to get their structures in place, and Caley Thistle have put in plenty of hard work to make sure they meet the criteria to be able to push on should results allow for it.
“That’s definitely the pleasing part of the changes,” Mason said.
“They finally got down to marking the criteria that they’ve been so demanding of over the last few years, and now it’s a case of if that isn’t in, you don’t get into the Championship.
“Standards across the board should go up on and off the pitch.
“It hasn’t been a surprise. Those teams who had a bit of work to do to get the criteria in place had two years to do so.
“If they haven’t done it, they can’t really complain if they’re sitting in League One at the moment.”
There will be several teams unknown to ICT, but their ambitions remain the same – compete for a spot in SWPL Two.
“We hope to be up at the top end of the table again,” Mason added.
“This year might be more of a transition year for us – we were comfortable in the north and we knew what teams we were capable of beating, albeit we didn’t always do that when we should have.
“We’ve lost some players as well, so we’re going to be bedding in a new team as well as taking on the league. We hope to challenge, but I guess only time will tell.”
