St Mirren Women started their season in blistering fashion with a 14-0 win over Dundee West on the opening day of the Scottish Women's Football League One season on Sunday.
Helen McLeod scored four, Ceara McIntyre & Maxine Fury (pictured above) both netted hat-tricks, Francesca Blair added a brace, while Hannah Coyle and Kelly Ross also scored as the Buddies won in emphatic fashion on matchday one.
St Mirren Women manager Kate Cooper praised her side and told stmirren.com: "Over the close season we've got the players to really look at what goals we want to set.
"One of them is that we want them scoring more goals and another is that we want more clean sheets and to concede less goals so Sunday was a really good start.
Maxine scored a hat-trick, Ceara got a hat-trick, Helen plays more as an attacking midfielder and got four goals so it was good for us on Sunday to get their confidence up and be more clinical with our finishing.
"We are looking at small marginals and setting targets like how many minutes can we go without conceding and how can we build that up over the season. If we can really be defensively sound then that just gives us the extra edge in games where we can nick it.
"To be fair to Dundee West, the season probably just came a bit too early for them. It's difficult in the women's game. They had five players missing through work and holidays so it was a very young team that was out against us and probably just a wee bit inexperienced at this level. For us, we still had to go up and do the work and still keep up our level of game so that we could actually get the result."
Up next for Saints Women is an SWF Championship and League One Cup match against Stenhousemuir.
Stenny finished one place above Saints in SWF League One last season and Kate stressed that the players won't rest on their laurels after Sunday's big win.
The players will always tell you I don't let them get too far ahead," Kate said.
"All of our more offensive players got on the scoresheet so what we're really looking at is whether we can have that mentality. It's about what everybody is producing. I want to create that squad mentality. What's really important is that there are other players within the squad that can step up when needed.
"The biggest thing we'll take forward from it is confidence so can we keep that going into our next game.
"It will be hard. Going forward we have Stenhousemuir, Airdrie and Falkirk so our next three games will be really tough games."
