'Our aim is to show progress during the season ahead' - Gary Hunt

By the time the 2026 SSE Airtricity Women’s Premier Division kicks off on Saturday next, it will have been twenty-two weeks or 154 days since Waterford FC women completed their 2025 season with a 3-2 win over Treaty United.

That brought the curtain down on an inaugural season in top-flight football, which on paper looks to be a poor one, but in context proved to be a very successful entry into the top echelons of women’s football in Ireland.

And for head coach Gary Hunt and his coaching team, the intervening period was a time to reflect on their first campaign. Even at the end of a campaign that produced just four wins across the league as well as a draw in their first All Island Cup campaign, the sight of hordes of young fans clamouring for autographs from their young heroines was a memory that will live long.

AIMING TO BUILD

“It's [the off-season] probably longer than we'd like it to be,” he mused when we sat down to look back. “But there's been a good opportunity for us to sit down and look back and, you know, see what kind of year it was.

“Obviously, a historic year for the club. Personally, I think it's a good year for us, in terms of making a stand in the league and having something to build on now. So, we have something to look back on now this season that we can compare ourselves to, and hopefully, in twelve months' time, we'll be able to say we've shown progress.” It was a big year on and off the pitch as Waterford FC added the final dimension to the club with the launch of a senior women’s team, and Hunt is conscious that they must progress and not shy away from ambition.

“We're ambitious, and we want to be the number one club in the Southeast. We have a little bit to go before we can get there, obviously, but we want to progress year on year.

“We've looked at, I suppose, how other clubs have fared in their infancy years. It does take time. We're not going to go overnight to becoming a team challenging in the top two, but hopefully, as I said, in time, we can get there.” And while there may be a little bit of desire to get to that top table as soon as possible, there is also a sense of realism around the team and club management.

“It takes time. Look at all the other clubs. We want to be a model that progressively builds. We don't want to just throw a lot at it and risk it not working and then maybe falling apart. In another 12 months' time, we could be looking at no club.

FANTASTIC WORK 

“It's important that we have that stability first, and then we can obviously grow and build and use the young talent because the talent in Waterford at the moment coming through from a young age is getting better and better, year on year. I think we'll see the fruits of that labour over the next five to 10 years.” And while the team does not have the resources available to other clubs, or even to the men’s team at Waterford, the effort and enthusiasm are up there.

“We put in some fantastic work last season. We increased contact time with the players; they bought into that, which was really important too, because, as I said, we want to get better. We wanted to compete with the best players in the country.

“We wanted that challenge to be an exciting challenge for the players. They do look forward to coming up against the likes of players in Athlone, players in Shelbourne who are international players, ex-international players, and putting themselves up against those players is a great barometer for themselves. We want to grow like that.” And as Hunt prepares for the new campaign, recruitment has been ongoing in the offseason, and he was pleased to retain some key players for 2026.

“We did get a good group of players last season, and it was important that we kept those - we kept the core of that group, and players do move on.

“Players were here last season and played their part in, as I said, a historic year for the club, and we thanked them for what they did, but now we've got that group that we've kept, and we're hopefully going to have some new players come and join that.” 

PLAYERS COME AND GO 

“That's the nature of football. Players will come and go, and staff will come and go, and things like that, but as I said, we want to build something here and use the players. We don't want it to be short-term, where we're changing vast numbers in the squad year on year.

“We want to grow something, so we want to use those players now to help embed the new players in, to grow again, to use that continuity of what we've been working on last season to bring it through to this season, so we don't have to start again from day one.

“That was a big thing that stood out to me in pre-season, when they came back, they were ready to train. It wasn't having to waste time around getting the standards and getting the intensity of the sessions right.

“They knew what was expected from the staff. They knew what was expected from each other. They know the level of intensity in the games.

That now allows us to build, and hopefully we'll be able to see the fruits of that come the first game of the season.”