Amber Wildgust’s early Nottingham Forest Women experience was almost biblical.
In the beginning, there was Before the Centre of Excellence.
That was a time when the women’s team (then called Nottingham Forest Ladies) were not associated with Forest’s professional men’s club, when the pitches they played on were borrowed (from non-League side Basford United), and when Wildgust’s mother washed the kits, her father was the manager and their family car served as a team bus.
At that point, in the early 2000s, the closest a nine-year-old Wildgust, who would go on to be appointed Forest’s head of women’s and girls football in July 2023, got to appearing at the City Ground in her playing kit “was when we were bucket-collecting outside a men’s game”.
Then came the Time of the Centre of Excellence.
It was awarded to Forest Ladies by the English Football Association (FA) and, according to Wildgust, brought pathways, qualified coaches and funding from the men’s branch of the club. Wildgust, by then a teenager, began ticking off her coaching badges and working with the girls’ under-10s and under-16s as the women’s senior squad rose to the FA Women’s Premier League, the highest level of the domestic football pyramid.
Then came After the Centre of Excellence.
The FA…
