Tayport had a junior football
team at the turn of the 19th century and won the East Fife Cup in 1905,
a competition, incidentally, which ended in 1973 with The present club was founded
in 1947 as an amateur club, The Amateurs at this time mainly comprised
local youngsters who had entered the team in the Midlands Alliance
League, a league essentially for clubs’ reserve Xl’s. Their
local rivals, the Violet played in the top league. By 1950 the Midlands
Amateur Football Association was expanding and in the re-organised
leagues both the Violet and the Amateurs found themselves in Division
Two. Promotion was swift and
the two local sides finished the season in first and second spot
respectively. 1952-53 saw the Violet and the
Amateurs finish second and third in the First Division behind the
champions YM Anchorage who, incidentally, had won every title since
1933. Then suddenly, Violet were gone! Despite finishing runners-up, it was
their last season. There were contrasting
fortunes for the Amateurs during the fifties and sixties but, despite
those often quite desperate times, what was important was the fact that
the club survived. The
seventies was a reasonably successful era with the club establishing
itself as a major force in the amateur game, going on to lift
the Midlands League Championship in 1981/82 and reaching the semi-final
of the Scottish Amateur Cup in 1985/86.
In
1980 the club which since 1953, had run a second string, started a third
amateur team - the Fife Xl - which was to enjoy 11 successful seasons in the East Fife Amateur
Association and, for one season, the Kingdom Caledonian League. Every honour in the game has been won and there have been three OVD Scottish Junior Cup final appearances during the subsequent thirteen years. It is a period during which the club has become the area's, indeed the country's, most successful junior club dominating Tayside Junior football in unprecedented fashion, winning every competition open to them including the OVD Scottish Junior Cup in 1996. In addition a number of players collected Scottish Junior International caps. The amateur sides gradually dwindled until in 2001, the club resigned its membership of the Midlands AFA, leaving the club with only the Junior team. The emergence this season of
the Whyte and Mackay East Region Super League has taken Tayport on to a
new level with regular league competition with the cream of junior
football. To win this competition in its inaugural season was a
magnificent achievement. Very much a community based club, Tayport FC's main sponsor since 1994 has been Tayport-based industrial textiles manufacturers Scott & Fyfe Ltd, a major employer in the town and a company with interests in many parts of the globe. So, as you can see, for a
club so tender in years, from a small community in north The very fact that they have appeared in four Scottish Cup finals since reaching that stage for the first time a mere ten years ago, indelibly endorses their tremendous pedigree.
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