Welcome to the Willow

Origin

Originally started by a group of friends from Bushloe High School in 1998 as an U14 team (then Wigston Wanderers) and managed by founding manager Dave Weston, becoming Wigston United’s U15 team in 1999 and playing our home matches at the old pitch back of the old council offices (now Heatherley Grove). With long term managers Pete Read and Gary Sylvester and later Lee Brewin the team remained with Wigston United into senior football, playing as their reserves until the club folded after the 2014-15 season. It was this summer that the team reformed as a new club to create our own identity. 

Reformation

It was decided at the time that being amongst a handful of men’s Sunday league teams in Wigston at the time that having Wigston in our name implied too broad a representation, so we opted for a ‘nod’ to our long term home and went with FC Willow instead. 

Addition of Youth Section

With still no plans to provide youth football it was 2016 that would provide the inspiration for this. Firstly, by England’s infamous dumping out of Euro 2016 by the ‘thunder-clapping’ Icelanders and secondly with one of original Willow players struggling to get their son into a local team which we established as a root cause of England’s failings. So, over the next 3 years we made plans for a launch the youth section. In the summer of 2019, we brought back ‘Wigston’ into the name when we renamed ourselves Wigston Willow as a statement of our intention to grow them club to one that did represent the whole of Wigston. We held the very first training session for our then U8s that summer and despite being able to count the number of players in that session on one hand we managed to muster a team for the season that soon became two teams then three etc. We now have multiple teams at most age groups as we continue our journey to become a true community club offering football for everyone.

The Green & Black Stripes

Why green and black stripes? It’s not an arbitrary decision to play in green and black stripes. Throughout our history under various guises, we’ve played in various colours: blue & yellow as Wigston United juniors, red, orange, blue and white hoops so in the absence of traditional colours we looked back to two milestone kits. Firstly our very first kit in 1998 as Wigston Wanderers was a green Umbro kit with black trim, secondly we won the EW Fosters cup during which year we just happened to be wearing a green & black striped kit (see image above) so this has now become our traditional club colours.