A Bonnyton Thistle stalwart is relishing the chance to see his side compete in the Scottish Cup.
Neil Wilson, who has been involved with the club for a number of years, has watched the incredible rise of the Kilmarnock side.
They were once a boys club playing at Under-18s level with one team, and now they have sides at all ages all the way up to senior football in the West of Scotland League.
And now after securing their SFA licence, they will be competing in the senior Scottish Cup from this season.
First team secretary Wilson told the Kilmarnock Standard: “We are chuffed to bits with how far the club has come.
“I played with Bonnyton round about 1971/72, and back then it was just one team – and it was the same when I joined Ian Higgins coaching 20-odd years ago.
“To see it build from there, the facilities and teams we have now is amazing.
“The support we’ve had from East Ayrshire Council has been important too, they had to give us things like a ground capacity and planning permission.
“But it’s exciting times being involved with the club, when I joined they were still in the Ayrshire leagues, they’ve been in Glasgow leagues, all sorts.
“But we’ve taken an Under-18s boys club team to the Scottish Cup, hopefully we can get a good draw out of it!
“We are dreaming of a special day at Townholm, you can only dream about where it will take you.
“We will take it as it comes though, you could get drawn away to a good East of Scotland team and you’re out in the first round.
“There are some really good sides in the early stages.”
Wilson admits the work involved in getting their licence was “frightening”.
He said: “It was relief getting it over the line to be honest, it was a lot of hard work.
“It’s all about crossing the Ts and dotting the Is, we already had the highest level of the SFA quality mark so we felt if we were going to be a senior club in the West of Scotland League we wanted that base to work from.
“So we thought if we get everything right at the ground it was something to build on.
“We could have spent a lot of money on the team last season and still finished seventh bottom with nothing to show for it.
“We finished bottom, but we felt we’d be better getting the infrastructure right and it’s a case of building on that.”
Wilson added: “Some people think it’s as simple as getting some floodlights up to become licenced, but that’s the least of the issues!
“The amount of documentation, I think that’s what frightens some people off.
“The club licence ‘booklet’ should be called a book... there’s hundreds of pages with different sections you need to work off.
“Some of the documentation is frightening, it’s so much, you have ground regulation policices, how you deal with unnacceptable conduct, customer charters, so many things you might not consider.”
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