Colin Stromsoy is confident that Team Northumbria are ‘ready and prepared’ to step up to Division One of the Northern League despite a difficult set of fixtures on the horizon.
TN’s opening clash sees them travel to North Shields, a team that amassed more than 100 points last season.
“It’s a baptism of fire,” said head coach Stromsoy. “It’s going to be a phenomenally challenging fixture, particularly because it’s away.
“They’ll have a squad full of big names, lots of experience and they’ll be against a team that’s on the other end of the experience ladder.
“We’ll make sure we’re ready and prepared as we always do and I’m sure we’ll have a very thorough pre-season as we always do. We’ll be ready for that first game when it comes.”
Northumbria’s first home game of the season sees them take on Billingham, an equally tough challenge in Stromsoy’s eyes.
“Until you get later on into the season, you’re not going to know really which fixtures, on balance, are the tougher games and which, on paper, will be the easier games,” he added.
“Clearly playing in the first division we’ll have a lot of harder games than we’ve had in the previous three seasons because it’s much higher quality.”
Stromsoy believes TN won’t need to change much of their pre-season routine to step up to the next level of competition.
“We’ve continued to improve and we’ve looked at the pre-season schedule carefully - we’ve had a chat about what we thought worked last year and what we thought didn’t work,” he added.
“We’re now in the final stages of renovating Coach Lane sports centre and our new high-performance centre which ultimately we’ll only really see a benefit over the medium and long term.
“Ultimately the very nature of how we approach our pre-season won’t have changed because obviously this year was a success for us. We’ve always had very good starts to the season.”
Team Northumbria travel to North Shields on Wednesday August 9 (7.30pm ko).
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