AS Supermarine embark on their second season in the Southern League Premier Division, sports reporter GARETH MOORHOUSE quizzes boss Mark Collier about all things Hunts Copse

GM: What are your goals for this season?

MC: Anyone from the outside can see this club has progressed massively in the last two years.

We have come from not being able to win a game in the Southern League, to winning promotion and holding our own in what I thought was a very strong league.

Now we need to make sure we become an established club in this league. If we get just two more points than last year, it will be a forward step.

We’ve seen a few players leave this summer, most notably Cedric Abraham moving to Halesowen Town. How hard is it to keep your best players?

I think that was always going to happen. We have some good young players at this club so it was no surprise. Money talks, and we are not a cash rich football club. There are clubs in lower leagues with a lot more money in comparison.

We have got a group of players who I think we can develop and that’s important. With younger players they do some fantastic things, but with youth you get inconsistency as well. That’s something we hope to address this season.

If Supermarine is not a ‘cash rich’ club in your words, then how difficult has been to attract fresh blood to Hunts Copse?

Hopefully we get players in who want to play for this football club, at this level in their own town. We try and sell them a good facility and a team that plays the game the right way.

We want to attract the right type of player, not just as a footballer but as a person as well. We have a fairly happy camp and we would like to keep it that way.

Only the relegated clubs had a worse goal difference than Supermarine last season. How are you going to address that?

We struggled to score goals and we had a couple of big defeats at Team Bath and at King’s Lynn.

Hopefully we have addressed that by bringing in Steve Cook and Alan Griffin who have scored regularly in pre-season. Obviously we need to keep clean sheets too, and by signing a quality goalkeeper like Matt Bulman we hope that will help.

You described last year as a learning curve for yourself and the players. What will you take from that into the new campaign?

Our Saturdays start at 9am and finish about 7pm, so it asks a lot of you both physically and mentally to be a coach in this league.

It asks a lot of the players as well, so commitment-wise it has changed from the division below.

We need to make sure we learn our lessons and how to stay in games. Maybe we should become boring for 15 minutes before half-time, to make sure we hold onto our leads.

‘Player development’ has been a phrase often used by yourself. How do you see the club progressing with such a young squad?

We think we can develop the players and ourselves as well. These lads can take on advice.

We like to think we have an open dressing room, after we have had our say they can put their views forward.

Some coaches hyperventilate on the sideline, but we like the players to find out for themselves.

The good thing with young players is that they are a confident bunch. We make sure we don’t get too excited when we’re winning or get too despondent when we lose.

King’s Lynn and Team Bath have departed courtesy of their promotion to the Conference South. Who are the favourites to win the league this season?

I think the likes of Cambridge City and Farnborough will expect to do well.

They are both big clubs with massive fan bases and they would expect to be in the league above or even higher.

The big spenders are allegedly Halesowen and Corby, and I think the teams coming into the league will strengthen it too.