YORK City Knights head coach James Ford was magnanimous in defeat, as he was beaten to the coach of the year award by Whitehaven boss Carl Forster.
Telling The Press in York he said: “Congratulations to Carl, to be a player and a coach takes some doing. He thoroughly deserves his award. Paul Crarey as well equally could have been acknowledged for this season. To win the League One Cup and be top of the league apart from Toronto, I feel a little bit for Paul.
“But quite rightly Carl’s been acknowledged for his young age and doing two roles, and well done to him and to Paul.”
Club chairman Jon Flatman believes it was a sterling effort to get four nominations on the night, and said that, that points to a bright future for the club.
He said: “We’re celebrating, we’ve picked up one award and come pretty close in two others so, looking at distance travelled (since the takeover at the turn of the year), we’ve done a decent job.”
Although the Knight’s missed out on the individual accolade’s they did win project of the year award. York won the accolade for their social media presence surrounding the game against Toronto.
On winning the award Flatman commented: “I think it was for far more than the social media campaign.
“I think fundamentally it was for the whole experience around the Toronto match, the two week build-up, the social media campaign, the fan interaction, the day itself, the number of people who turned up, plus the fact the first team went out and got a fantastic win, and on top of that the legacy from it.
“There has already been masses of interest around what happened with the Toronto game, the financials of it, the awareness, the media, the social media, the marketing. We’ve already had lots of discussion around that already, and Toronto themselves are pretty proud to have been part of that game.”
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