Ellie Kemp is “very confident” Watford Ladies will be staging another game at Vicarage Road this season.

The Golden Girls played their first ever Women’s Super League 2 fixture at the home of the Hornets last March when more than 1,100 fans watched Watford suffer a 4-1 defeat against Aston Villa.

Former boss John Salomon was hopeful at that stage that more ladies' matches could be played at Vicarage Road in future seasons, but it now seems to be a case of when - and not if - a date for a game is confirmed since the women’s side became a full part of Watford FC.

“I’m currently in conversation with the club around that,” said the ladies’ general manager when asked about playing a fixture at Vicarage Road during the club’s pre-season press briefing on Saturday. “We’re looking at confirming what date or what game that might be, but obviously it will be at the back end or the men’s season.

“But the conversations are being had and we’re very confident we’ll be in a position to get a game confirmed here which will be fantastic for the girls.”

Kemp has been in post for five weeks as part of a new-look ladies’ management set up that also saw Katie Rowson appointed head coach. Both roles were previously undertaken by Salomon, when the ladies team came under Watford's Community Sports and Education Trust, before he left to take up a post with the FA at the end of the last WSL2 season.

The general manager is aware that playing a game at Vicarage Road rather than their usual Berkhamsted FC matchday home would provide a bigger stage for the club to showcase itself to a probable larger audience, but she is also conscious of the club not getting ahead of itself.

“I always call it the chicken and egg,” she explained. “What do you do first? Do you go out into a big stadium and not pack it out or do you build Berkhamsted and our support there and take it over to a bigger stadium.

“I think the direction is here we’re taking baby steps, we’re doing things the right way and then hopefully the vision is to have a game at Vicarage Road and certainly address a lot of the Watford men’s team’s fans and that’s the avenue we want to go down.”

That ‘baby steps’ philosophy also underpins what Kemp hopes the team can achieve in the forthcoming campaign which gets under way at London Bees on Wednesday, March 23, having finished bottom of WSL2 last season.

She said: “I think we understand where we finished last year was where we didn’t want to be. There’s a lot of changes that have taken place since then.

“In the last couple of months we’ve come on board on the men’s side, we’re now fully integrated and as a result we want to utilise the resources available to push up the league. I think realistically move three or four places up the league in the next season and push towards the top end of the league the following season.”

Asked what she felt held the club back last season, Kemp responded: “We were not integrated with the club and that’s a massive pull as everyone knows with them being a Premier League outfit and a great club that can behind the women’s team and really push us forward.

“Also a lot of the girls have come through the player pathway with us and they’re looking for something new, something fresh to get their teeth into. So myself and Katie coming on board, we’ve got a whole new medical staff, backroom staff and coaching outfit, everything’s evolved over the last couple of months so it’s a big, big change. But again it’s very much steered by the men’s side so we’re using a lot of their coaches and a lot of their resources as well which is absolutely brilliant to pull that elite level into our team.”

But it is not just on the pitch where the Golden Girls have challenges to address.

Kemp, whose background combines supporter services, ticketing, sponsorship and project management, said: “Let’s be honest, football is a money game and we need to look at competing with the bigger teams and in order to do that we need to look at sponsorship, we need to look at commercial opportunities.

“My role off the pitch is very much around professionalising the team and that will come through being more financially stable so we can then attract the right players at the right amount of money, but also so we can look to start to give these girls some more of the attention they deserve.

“If we professionalise off the pitch and start to get the right people in and move in the right direction then that should breed onto the pitch as well.”

Kemp continued: “We genuinely have a new-found sense of belief. There’s some new players coming in, some new talent who really see where we’re going.

"They’ve [the current players] never done a press day like we’ve done this morning and they understand that’s the basis, the absolute minimum we’re looking to achieve is to utilise the assets that we have as a club.”

Katie Rowson also discussed her role as head coach on Saturday and you can read her thoughts here.