Huntly

Some of my favourite United memories were Scottish Cup games.

Huntly away, I remember.

I remember Huntly away where we Jim came on the pitch to... schooled all the fans because the advertising board got knocked over.

That was ridiculous.

I mean, Huntley away as well, I always remember that.

And one of the things he tries to do at the start of his campaign is get to Aberdeenshire because it's one of the places that he thinks he can recruit lots of men.

And the reason for that is that Aberdeenshire is the realm of the Gordons of Huntly, who are very loyal to Charles I.

So there is this battle of Fivie Castle.

It's not a battle as such.

Yeah.

That some of the places, like in Hunt, we have one in Huntly, and that's not a big town.

No.

There's not a lot of, wouldn't be as many people looking for a job there as, say, maybe the nurseries in Aberdeen.

recruitment pool is much smaller, isn't it? It's much, much smaller.

Yeah.

although there's like little surrounding towns the actual town of Huntly is not very big so yeah that can be and some of them as well although like they run on different days so you can work in different groups some of them are too far away for that to be feasible if you live in Banff as I said you couldn't work in the Stonehaven one and the after school group it wouldn't be worth your while the travel so yeah the rural aspect of the whole of kind of Aberdeenshire can be a bit of a challenge as well I

think that rurality is a challenge for childcare, children's services, full stop, isn't it? Not just for what we do, but it's certainly something that you hear talked about a lot.

The sport is, obviously, you know, whether it's rugby or football, you know, I spent a couple of days with Craig Brown the Scotland manager at the time when I took over as national coach in 99 and I wanted to kind of find out what was what was a good way of organising teams etc and he was he was tremendous he gave me a load of time load of information load of help so again different sport but still trying to do the same thing really so there's probably way too way too many yeah But I've been so fortunate to be able to do that.

So for the guys out there, can you just give them a little bit of background on where you started in your golf career and how it led you to moving from Huntly to Lanarkshire at age 16?

Yeah, I decided that probably when I was about 13 or 14, I would say I was quite obsessive about things when I'd get into them.

And I loved golf as a kid.

What, what, when did that happen in that timeline? When was your first marathon?

Um, I think I, a- again, because of COVID, I was kind of a bit restricted initially, but I ran my first f- 10K, I think my first race, proper race, um, was a race in Huntly.

It's the Huntly 10K, so there's a, a, a day of races in Huntly around the Huntly Hirst, which is like this sort of harvest type festival in September.

Wow.

And the whole town just gets taken over, and they do a 5K, 10K, and a half marathon.

...

but it was a really good vibe, 'cause it's always around my birthday.

And my, my dad and my stepmom live in Huntly, so they always come out, so it just has, like, a really nice feeling around that race, so.

Yeah.

Um, so good win for Huntly away at Bethro- uh, Juniors.

Um-

Mm-hmm.

Dunbarton, Keith.

Mm-hmm.

Um, Huntly, Annan.

I can have Annan, seeing that they're in League Three, the Third Division.

Those two teams will feel pretty hard done by to have drawn against each other, Mike.

Yeah, I think you, you could also look at somebody like Huntly versus Annan.

If Annan are still on a kind of rough patch of form, last thing they want is to have a massive journey up to Aberdeenshire.

And look, we have seen the likes of Fort William in previous seasons kind of knock out a, I think they knocked out an SPFL.

I think they might knock out, may have knocked out Elgin a couple of years back.

Now Huntly are just kind of run-of-the-mill Highland League sides.

But again, like, that's not necessarily the trip that you want to be making on a bad run of form.

So I do think there might be the odd upset here or there.