THE WITTON COLUMN - By Paul Harper

IT’S been an award-winning week for Witton Albion as our matchday programme scooped the top prize from M60 Programmes as Programme of the Year for the Northern Premier League.

It is great credit to our programme editor Stephen Conneely who puts in an incredible amount of hard work ahead of every game to put the publication together.

The Albion News consists of a minimum of 48 pages for a home league match, sometimes more, and is available for just £2 on matchdays.

Stephen does a fantastic job of pulling it all together, with the help of regular content contributors and photographer Karl Brooks who designs the front cover.

It’s a great achievement to win such a prestigious award, so a huge congratulations to Stephen and everyone else who contributes to the programme.

Last week also saw us promote a new newsletter which will be launching in the next couple of weeks.

The club is looking to improve our communication to our key stakeholders, and the newsletter will be a great way to connect with people directly to their inbox.

We’ll be looking to bring supporters the latest news from the club, from the boardroom to the dressing room, with some exclusive stories and interviews to be made available, as well as giving subscribers the opportunity to take part in things such as polls for Player of the Month and surveys to provide feedback on the matchday experience, for example.

Details of how supporters can get involved and sign up to the newsletter can be found on the club’s website and we look forward to sending out our first edition in the coming days.

On top of those things, in my role as Media Officer, I was delighted to have unearthed some archive videos which we’ll be publishing to the club’s YouTube channel in the next few weeks.

There are some excellent matches in there, with some great goals, so hopefully Wittoners will enjoy watching them when they go up on the channel.

During the enforced break, we have put together videos to recall the FA Trophy Final in 1992 plus some of the run to get to that stage, a classic FA Cup tie at Halifax Town plus various other great retro games.

It has been great to relive some of those moments and the players involved in the games. The response to it, as well as some old team photos which have been posted on social media, has been excellent so it’s been good to do.

While it’s always nice to look on previous success and good memories, we are still focused on looking forward and the hard work continues to try and improve the club all the time.

There is a lot of positive goings on right now and we’ll continue to keep supporters aware of everything that’s happening at Wincham Park.

Take care everyone and stay safe.

n If you have missed any of our contributed football or rugby columns over the past weeks or months, you can find them at northwichguardian.co.uk