Three years ago, Isla Sheardown asked her father for a small budget and a spare office to try something most Elite Division clubs still didn't have in any real form: a player-welfare programme with a genuine open door, not just a poster in the dressing room.
It now handles everything from academy homesickness to senior professionals quietly working through relationship breakdowns, and this month logged its highest number of player-initiated contacts since it launched.
Isla is unusually direct, including with the local press, about why she thinks it works: she manages her own generalised anxiety, has done for over a decade, and built a programme around the kind of support she wishes had existed for her at nineteen.
“I'm not running this despite it,” she said at a recent fan forum, to a longer round of applause than she expected. “I'm running it because of it, and it's the most useful thing about me in this job.”