RESILIENT. September MOTM awards for Huddersfield and Bridgwater

With strong showings in September, FAWNL Manager of the Month awards go to Huddersfield Town’s Glen Preston in the Premier Division and Bridgwater United’s Steve Perkins in Division One.

Clare McEwen speaks to both managers and learns the secrets to their teams’ success so far this season.

HUDDERSFIELD TOWN  – NORTHERN PREMIER DIVISION – GLEN PRESTON

Huddersfield Town were promoted back into the Northern Premier Division this season as Division One North champions.

Having been relegated from Tier 3 in 2024, Glen Preston’s side won the club’s first double in 15 years as they added the Sheffield & Hallamshire County Cup trophy to their league title.

As it is for many clubs in the Women’s National League, Huddersfield’s story is about more than points on the page. 

After a sixth-place finish in the Northern Premier Division in 2022-23, things began to slide. 

They were losing their best players to other clubs and found themselves struggling to compete. 

They were relegated in 2023-24 and finished the following season fifth in Division One North.

In June 2025, the women’s team was fully integrated with the men’s club. They were given financial backing to build the squad, they began training three times a week, and gradually more professional standards were applied.

Now they are reaping the rewards with promotion, trophies, and a very strong start to life back in Tier 3.

After two wins and a draw in August, Preston’s side won both September league fixtures. Wins over Derby County and Hull City in September took them to the top of the table at month’s end, earning Glen Preston September’s FAWNL Manager of the Month.

Congratulations on Manager of the Month, Glen. Tell me how you’ve managed to come back into a really tough league and start so well?

A lot of it is the backing we’ve had when we came under the umbrella of the men’s team.

That’s been a huge resource for us, in the sense that they’ve been incredibly supportive. It’s allowed us to be able to put the pillars in place, the foundations in place to be incredibly successful. 

We recruited incredibly well last season. The team that we came up with finished the season unbeaten in the last six months. 

So we already felt that we’re coming up as a strong side. 

We added two or three really high quality players in the summer that just added to that.

Recruitment’s a huge part of it – the staff is incorporated within that. 

We’re just starting to get a very good mix, a good blend of everything all coming together at the same time – that’s allowed us to build a lot of momentum.

Behind the scenes as well, one of the areas that we’ve pushed for, more than ever before, is the player psychology element, the mindset, the mentality. 

We’ve done a lot of work in that area to try and turn our players into those kinds of machines, that winning mentality.

We’re bearing the fruits of that on the pitch because we haven’t lost two in a row in 18 months. I don’t think that’s an accident. It’s not easy to achieve something like that. 

The players have got an incredible amount of resilience, they understand what it takes to win games of football, how to bounce back from adversity.

That’s been where a lot of our success has been over the last 12 months really.

So it’s been a continuation of what you’re building. Nothing particularly different this season, just continuing?

We didn’t go out and do wholesale recruitment this year because the foundation was already laid last year. It felt like we could go and cherry pick just two or three high quality signings – players like AK, Aimee Kelly, from Burnley who was a proven league winner already.

She’s out for the season now, which is a real shame because she was absolutely firing on all cylinders. 

But that’s a player we were able to scout for a number of weeks, if not months. And as soon as she became available, we already knew that she’d fit the exact way we wanted to play and was a perfect piece of the jigsaw puzzle. 

So recruitment was a lot easier for us this year, just to cherry pick two or three players that were missing from our arsenal, if you like.

The continuity and consistency is why we’ve had a bit of success.

How would you describe your team’s style? 

That’s something I think is the most interesting –  so it’s a really good question.

We have two very different styles. What makes us unique is we have the ability to have 60% possession in a game. Like a lot of teams, we have the fluidity, we have the rotations, we have the finesse players, the tech/tac [technical/tactical] element to us. 

But what we’ve also got within our squad profile is five or six, what I would say, absolute warriors, machines, they’re killers. 

We always look at it as, in any given season, you might play on horrendous pitches or in horrendous weather or you just play against opposition that’s so stubborn, good at their craft, that you need to win a game through different ways and means.

We’re able to turn to those kinds of profile players and make ourselves an absolute brute of an opposition, physical brute. 

We’ve been able to steamroll a lot of teams through physicality. 

That’s what makes us an incredibly dangerous side to plan and prepare against – you don’t know whether you’re going to play against the side that’s going to out-hustle you or a side that’s going to outplay you and outhink you. 

That’s the element that surprises a lot of opposition.

We’re tactically quite flexible. 

Rhena [Lord-Mears] described it best, one of my players. She says, we’re one of the most adaptable teams – and that’s one of our core strengths. 

Is there a game so far this season that sums up the team? 

The Stoke performance would describe that. While we didn’t win that game, it was a very good football game – a great advert for women’s football, from both sides.

Stoke are a good side. It was a good benchmark for us to really see where we’re at.

But what I liked about us in that game is we went in with the intent to play football and Stoke didn’t allow us to play to our game plan.

So we had to show that adaptability within the game. 

We were lucky to just be one-nil down at half time, I thought.  And yet somehow in the second half we were able to adapt to change things. 

And I think Stoke were incredibly lucky to get a draw in that game.

If things had fallen into place as they should have done, we’d have scored three or four goals in that second half.

In my opinion we kind of steamrolled the opposition from what was a losing position. 

Against Hull you could also say that.

We were one-nil down in that game and came back to win in similar fashion. They wouldn’t allow us to play to our normal game plan so we had to again adapt, think on our feet.

Those wins illustrate it.

And I will just touch on, if I may, the Loughborough performance because that probably shows the first side of the coin about how we play – the finesse side. 

We played some of the most beautiful football I’ve seen.

We played at the Accu Stadium. We won 5-1 and I thought it was some of the best football I’ve seen from a Huddersfield Town side over the last decade, in many respects.

The flowing football was brilliant to see.

How are you finding the league so far?

Incredibly challenging, incredibly tough.

Every side’s got good managers at this level. Everyone’s got their own unique style of playing. 

It really is an open league this season.  

In previous years, you’ve always seen maybe a Newcastle, a Forest, Wolves, Burnley sort of run away with things and you kind of knew where you were in the league.

They were going to run away with it and everyone else was playing for whatever was left. 

This year, everyone’s looked at it and gone, there’s an opportunity for anyone and everyone who’s ready to step up. 

What you’ve got is a lot of different flavours within the league.

There’s some outstanding tacticians, some outstanding teams. 

I don’t think that with losing both Wolves and Burnley the quality of the league is diluted, in any case. 

There’s a lot of players filtered down from WSL into this league. 

What I do think is it’s just made more teams more competitive this year. A lot of teams have invested well, so it’s incredibly challenging and tough at the moment.

We’ve got quite a depleted side at this very minute. So we’re going to have to show every ounce of resource and resilience that we’ve got to try and make sure we can stay up there with the chasing pack.

Can you describe your style as a manager? What’s your philosophy? Using a word that managers hate!

It’s hard to describe a philosophy because we’re sort of influenced by quite a number of cultures, really.

Whether that’s [Jürgen] Klopp and [Marcelo] Bielsa who are a heavy influence on the way that I would like to see our football played.

We’re incredibly intense. If I had to summarise in one word, it’s intense. 

We don’t let the opposition breathe. We always say we don’t necessarily need to have the best players to beat anybody in this league.

Rugby [Borough], for example, might have better players than us, but I’ll believe that we can still beat them.

Because we’re so intense we won’t allow them to get to [their] football. There’s very few sides who can get to their quality and their patterns against us. 

To beat us, you have to be amazing, you have to have everything on point. 

That’s what we’ve seen over the last 18 months. Any side that beats us, we’ve had to tip our hat off to because it’s like: you really earned that. You had to fight tooth and nail to get that result against us.

We’re intense but with the ability to really show our craft.

We have that little bit of finesse about us that really makes teams scratch their head a little bit. 

Who’ve been the players who’ve helped you win this award this month? Who’s stood out so far this season?

I think players and staff. Our staff behind the scenes are incredible.

My assistant manager [James Horner], I’d like to give him a little nod because I don’t think he gets the credit he deserves. 

He works very hard, does an incredible job on the analysis.

We’re both analysts, both very analytical, and we go into a lot of detail and that’s where we get a lot of our edges.

We feel like we understand most of the teams that we play and how they will change, quite well. 

In terms of the playing side – it feels a little bit wrong – I feel this is a very complete team from start to finish and singling out any individual, just feels a little bit like I’d be doing somebody a disservice.

The goals – we’ve been the top goal scorers in the league – so you could look at that side, but they only score because everyone else runs through brick walls.

So, yeah, I’d like to keep it at that if I can.

Absolutely – I love that.

Looking ahead to the rest of the season, what do you want to improve on – maybe on and off the pitch? 

Oh good question. For us to be in a proper title challenge we’re still looking for a couple of pieces of the jigsaw puzzle to add. 

We’ve got quite a young squad, we’ve taken quite a few players in on loan, so I’d love to see us develop those so they can really establish themselves at this level.

We’d love to improve our defensive record. 

In terms of off the field, this club has done wonderful things.

We’ve just moved to a new football ground in Emley and we’ve just got a new S&C coach who works across the first team. We’ve hired full-time physios.

The club has upgraded almost absolutely every single element of it. So in terms of that, I can’t ask for much more.

From us, just because we’re a little bit injury depleted at the moment, as any manager would be, we probably always just want that one more player.

I think that’s where it is. 

If we could get just one more player, I feel like we could genuinely be in this title challenge – we would be right up there with the Rugbys, Stokes and West Broms, for sure. 

What are the ambitions for this season and beyond? 

We’ve put no ceiling on what we can and can’t achieve this season. 

With our team, there’s always hope.

We may not have the experience quite yet that Rugby Borough or Stoke has, but like we saw against Stoke the other day, we can beat any team in this league because we’ve got so much heart and soul.

That intensity is what we look for in our recruitment drive and we get the best out of the players, I would say, as a management team.

So for us, there’s always hope. We’re only four points off it, we’ve got Rugby Borough to play and so win those games, we’re very much in it. 

I don’t know, is the honest answer. 

We’re not under pressure to win a league title, but at the same time, if we get our best team out and fit, there’s no one in this league that we can’t beat.

It’d be lovely to go on an FA Cup run. It’d be lovely to win the Plate cup – they’re genuine ambitions for us. 

But from where we are at this moment in time, if we were to finish top three, top four, that would be what success looks like. 

That would mark a fantastic year for us.

BRIDGWATER UNITED  – DIVISION ONE SOUTH WEST – STEVE PERKINS

Bridgwater United have an interesting, but sometimes difficult history.

They were once in the WSL as Yeovil Town Ladies. They merged with men’s club Bridgwater Town in 2020-21, were relegated to Division One South West in 2022-23, then split from the men’s club and lost their home ground during the 2023-24 season.

Then, as an independent women’s club, the rebuild began.

Enter Steve Perkins, who had previous experience as a technical talent coach for youth players at the FA and was assistant coach with England Women age group teams.

He took over Bridgwater United in 2024-25, beginning with a very young group of players – average age under 19 – and finished a very respectable seventh in the league.

Stadium stability followed and, after a season at The Hand Stadium in Clevedon, they are back in Bridgwater at The Ethan Berry Pavilion, Middlezoy.

Last season they finished Division One South West in third position. Currently, they are top of the table with a 100% win record.

Their flawless start has earned Steve Perkins the September FAWNL Manager of the Month award. 

Nice to meet you, Steve. Congratulations on September’s Manager of the Month. Tell me how you have masterminded Bridgwater’s amazing start to the season?

It’s probably been three years in the making. When we started the journey, we spoke about what good looked like and what we wanted to try and achieve.

Brick by brick, we’ve been putting those pieces together, and here we are. 

It’s been a great nine months of success on the pitch, but I think it’s been 18 months of hard work off the pitch. 

So this is a continuation of the work that’s gone on in the background over the last few years. This is it coming together?

Yes. I think it’s been 16 league games without a loss – it goes back to January 29th. 

We’ve won our last 13 games, so August, September have been really profitable months for us with league victories. 

But it’s definitely been a lot of hard work that’s brought us to this point.

It’s still early days, but the team are really excited about this little run that we’re on. 

Anything different tactically or is that also a continuation from previous few seasons?

Yeah, we stick to a plan.

We probably spent a lot of time in the first two years worrying about opposition because other teams were probably in a better place than what we were. 

But probably for the last 12 months in particular, we’ve been focusing very much on us, and how we want to play. 

And also trying to make it a little bit difficult for opposition teams to analyse us, in terms of, we do change our shape. 

We’ve got a couple of different defaults that we can go to, and the empowerment of the players. 

Often I leave it to them – if you change that shape, I’m not going to start shouting from the sides because we do work on it, in training, around a little bit of flexibility.

Yeah, it’s working right now and if it goes wrong then I’m happy to take the blame for that. An exciting time to be at the club.

How would you describe your team’s style? 

From previous experiences, the biggest takeaway working with international squads was always around how we become more competitive the physically more capable we were.

We’ve really focused since day one on being really fit and ready to go. I’ve used a lot of the metrics that we did in those international teams to explain where we’re at as a team.

When we look at the physical data, the team work so hard. 

When we get a three game week, the players are used to it because the load of a Thursday training session would be match day kind of data.

I would definitely say that physically, we’re very, very strong. 

We’ve got some exciting players. We’ve signed a couple of players that have got Tier 3 experience. 

We’ve been dominating in the final third, which probably in the first season and a half, we didn’t create the amount of chances that we’re currently creating.

I think in every game this season, we’ve been in double figures with shots on target, but in some of those games we’ve been hitting 25 plus shots on target in games. 

So one of these days there’s going to be a really big score line! But at the minute, we’re just happy with three points. 

The attention to detail for fitness and using the international metrics, how long have you been doing that?

I worked for the FA for 15 years, previous to this role, and seven of those years was as a technical talent coach in the London/Southeast [region]. 

I worked with the England players in the London clubs – so, Arsenal, Chelsea – with the squads from 1997 to 2006 borns.

There was a lot of talent in that region, a lot of them now in the England senior team, which is brilliant and great work from those clubs. 

But yeah it’s been since day one that we’ve just tried to show what the top looks like and how far off we can get to that.

And then it is that education of sometimes someone will do 10K in a game but high speed running or the sprint distances are very low.

So whilst that metric looks good, it’s trying to educate – well there’s times where players have gone past you and that might be that extra sprint that you need to do.

It’s that fine balance between education and actually winning that I think we’ve done really well to this point.  

But we’re going to lose at some point and it’s learning from that process. 

Is there a game so far this season that sums the team up? 

The Moneyfields game at the start of October. 

Because we’ve been really resilient, we haven’t conceded many goals – we had kept five clean sheets – so it was almost, right, who’s going to score against us?

It was that mentality that we were trying to drive. But to go two-nil down…

We had it in the game plan and what-ifs. What if they score first? And we asked the group to regroup and try to solve the problem.

We conceded a second goal just before half time, and the way that they got together at that point was, right, this game’s not done. 

And then to come out for the second half and score four goals and win in the manner we did.

It was that athleticism that we could go up gears. That was something really special because it’s the first time in the three seasons that we’ve beaten Moneyfields – they’ve got the better of us in all the other fixtures.

It was one that we were looking at thinking, if we can get a positive result here, we’ll have a fair reflection of where we’re at. 

Who’ve been the players who’ve helped you win this award. Who stood out? 

Literally, every single one of them.

We’ve had some bad luck. In the first year, Ellie Mitchell, who was the club captain when I arrived, ruptured her ACL the training session before the season started and she was our goalkeeper.

So we loaned a 16-year-old from Bristol City who started the season for us.

We then lost our club captain at the start of last year with an ACL rupture on exactly the same session – the last training session before the season started. 

But if I had to pick a few names, Manfy Sharpe’s been an incredible signing for us and she was one that signed in October in our first season in 2024-25.

She’s brought that experience of winning the league with Exeter. A very big character, drives the standards. 

Then in season two, we were able to sign Meg Jarvis from Bristol Rovers. We signed Meg scoring 19 goals and she went on to score a further, I think, 15 for us as well in league and cup.

That took us on a really long run of winning games because we were probably creating chances before, but to have that goal scorer. 

And then this season, we signed Ella Pemberton and Abbey Hateley and also Ellie Strippel – who’s been incredible for us. I think she’s had nine or ten assists already this year.

Then the long-standing players, Mabel [Ellie Mae-Bell] who’s played over 100 games, Gracie Owen is approaching 100 and Keeley Banfield – ‘Banners’ – as well. 

I’ve probably missed loads and they’re probably going to be really annoyed at me now, but like I said, every single one of them – they’re just brilliant.

Sometimes when the S&C coach is asking them to just do that one more run, they don’t moan, they get on with it. That’s the standards that we’ve set and they adhere to it. 

Looking ahead to the rest of the season, what do you want to improve – on or off the pitch? 

When I look back to year one, there was no real structure around how we play. There were no game plans. There was no information being shared, so we definitely started there.

Trevor Jenkins, the general manager – who deserves so much credit – they brought on board some non-executive directors last year and created a three-year strategy. 

If you look at the three-year strategy, one of the things we said was, in year one we had an average age of 17.1 at the start, it went to 17.8 and ended at about 18.

And I had said that I think to be successful, we need an average age of 23. 

Against Moneyfields, our average starting 11 was 23.1. 

The directors, the social media presence, the media team. We had over 300 at our last game, so gates are rising. This weekend, while the game’s been cancelled because of the FA Cup replay, I think there was going to be close to 500 at the Spurs game [PGA U21s], which would have been incredible. 

Just seeing all these things on and off the pitch.

Our biggest focus right now is to go back to clean sheets. They were a great habit. We’ve conceded in our last two games and we’re gonna just go back to being really resilient and hard to break down.

What are the ambitions for this season and beyond?

Again, if you look at the strategy, it’s no secret that we want to achieve promotion this year. 

It’s really difficult when only one team goes up. It would have been really nice if there was that play-off place this year as well, but I guess it adds to the competition – we know we’ve got to win to go up.

In that strategy, it was to be competitive in Tier 3. 

The history of the club is huge. When you look at Yeovil, previously, they were WSL –  there’s still a history of this club. It’s incredible.

When I go back to players that I’ve signed at some point, they’ve all had a connection to the club. They were either Yeovil youth team players or they’d been Bridgwater United when they were Tier 3 previously or they’ve had some association to the club. 

So there’s no one really that has joined us that is completely non-associated to the club. That’s been something we’ve been really passionate about.

What a story that would be if you ended up back in the WSL.

We’ve got some incredible backing from the owners, Mike and Tony. They flew over from America and were at our Bournemouth game last weekend. The ambitions are really high at the club and long may the women’s game grow and continue.

Photo credits: Huddersfield Town, Bridgwater United Women