Heidelberg United has confirmed Bill Mihaloudis will be the club’s inaugural Women’s National Premier League coach.
The decision means Heidelberg will be the only club from the WPL to retain both its structure and coach in 2016.
Mihaloudis, who led the side to a semi-final appearance in his first season at the helm, expressed his delight to be guide the club into an exciting new era.
“We [the club and Mihaloudis] had a meeting, discussed the whole season and asked if I’d like to continue on – I was stoked with that, very happy,” Mihaloudis said.
“Basically it means we can continue with what we set out to do 12 months ago and build on that, we’ve got a plan in place and are working towards that goal.”
Part of the plan is successful youth development, which began manifesting itself this season, as the club won the Women’s Premier League Reserves competition with a considerably young squad.
Mihaloudis confirmed that while youth development was a required focus of the National Premier League application process, the club was proactive in implementing a successful system early as part of a long term plan for sustained success at Olympic Village.
“Our NPL season started at the beginning of this year, we initially wanted to make it a long term plan, the goals that we wanted to achieve included making sure we had a good youth base to work with and build on that,” he said.
“Our reserves team for example was a very young team with only a couple of experienced players, everything was built around that the next three years in the NPL we establish ourselves from a development point of view.
“It’s fantastic to see a group of girls with an average age of 15-16 win the reserves competition.
“NPL is based on development and that’s what we want to make sure we’re achieving.
“Having a good young core of girls, it won’t be long until they’re senior representatives at the club, and were blooding them now to get to that level.”
Whilst next season is still a long way off, after finishing in fifth place in a tight WPL race this year – only four points off second place – and coming two games away from a grand final appearance, Mihaloudis also said the seniors side has plenty to build on, with an outlook of finishing even higher and challenging for league honours.
“What we want to achieve next year – we want to make sure we play to the best of our ability at the highest level possible,” he said.
“We played the finals this year and we want to make sure go to the next level and go top two, top three, and there’s no reason why we can’t do that.”