Club History upto Summer 2008

Netherton Football Club was established in1982 as an adult’s football team. As their players become more senior in years they developed a vision for putting something back into the game and set up firstly Netherton Colts FC and then a training academy for children to develop skills based on their experience gained at many different levels of the amateur game.

In 1990 the highly successful Netherton Colts Training Academy was established. This Soccer Clinic was aimed generally at children in their reception year at school to be taught the basics of the “beautiful game,” our club Netherton East was formed from the children who graduated as 5 & 6 year olds in 2004.

The class of 2004 was established and was initially Managed by Jamie Morgan and Assisted by Mark Foley and Chris Drew. The club was given a set of portable goals by Netherton FC and went around begging and borrowing the bits of equipment needed to start as a league club and acquired a second hand strip to for our first season. The club rallied and over the course of the season ironed out all of teething problems off the field and formed a squad, which would be our bedrock to build from in future years.

Jamie left the club after our first season which saw the team establish a mid table position in its in-augural campaign in the under 8 minors Division C. At the end of the season Chris Drew took over as manager and appointed Wayne Downing to assist him with the running of the club and later Mark Foley would rejoin as coach.

The season of 2005 – 6 would see our team flourish as the players gained confidence, and after winning 18 and drawing 3 of the 22 league games, the team would finish runners up in Division 3 of the Stourbridge and District Youth league missing out on the Championship by a single point.

2006 – 7 saw “East” push on into Division 2, a great season was enjoyed by all at the club, where we finished 4th in the division and got promoted despite missing out on automatic promotion by a just one point, although this season Netherton were the only team to beat the eventual champions and defeating the runners in a close run race for the title. We also held the accolade for the most clean sheets, 8 in total the highest for any team in the top 3 divisions.

2007 – 8 saw Netherton in our inagural season in Division 1, achieve our goal of still being in the top flight of youth football when we graduated to 11-aside football. This task was achieved by quite a margin winning half of our matches and finishing 10th in the league only a few points away from the top five. John Smart had joined the team as coach at the end of the previous season and was joined mid-way through the season by Tony Kimble. Their joint experience obviously rubbed off improving the team week by week with Netherton winning all 3 closed season tournaments entered at Briefly Hill, Silverdale & Oldswinford respectively.

Netherton East are all now looking forward to starting out 11-aside football at our new home ground Oldbury College of Sport (Moat Road Campus) with our new sponsors Interserve, Vietec and Arco as we build a squad good enough to challenge a top 5 position in the S&DYFL top division.