The modern club

The years after Seaview were, in the league at least, the best on record. The promoted side finished fourth in the Premier at the first attempt, then third in both 2012–13 and 2013–14, the highest league finishes in the club’s documented history. In the middle of that came the greatest cup run of all. In 2012–13 Kilmore went to the quarter-finals of the Irish Cup, by round six the only club left from outside senior football’s top two divisions. Tobermore United were seen off in a replay, then Championship side Institute were beaten 2–0 on their own ground, Andrew Telford pouncing for the first and Stephen Douglas converting a penalty. The quarter-final, at Solitude on 2 March 2013, ended 2–0 to a Cliftonville side that would win the league title that same season, with Kilmore keeper Michael McKenna earning the plaudits even in defeat. Nine months later the club was back at Seaview for a fourth Border Cup final, lost to Albert Foundry in a Boxing-week gale. That trophy still waits.

Off the pitch, the club’s centre of gravity shifted towards its young people. The academy formalised in the 2017 anniversary year was headed by Andy Waterworth and Michael Carvill. Waterworth is the Crossgar-born striker who left Kilmore for the Irish League in 2005 and finished with over 130 goals for Linfield before becoming head of the Irish FA’s academy; Carvill, the former Linfield and Crusaders winger, went on to serve as Kilmore’s player-manager from 2021 to 2026. A club that once sent its best players away now had them coming back to build the next generation, offering “enjoyment, confidence and bravery in everything we do”, as the academy put it, to well over a hundred children of every background across the district.

The boldest move came in October 2020, mid-pandemic, when chairman Conal Bell unveiled a £1 million redevelopment plan for Robert Adams Park. “This is for Crossgar and the surrounding community”, he told the Down Recorder. In January 2024 the plan won a £400,000 award from the Irish FA and UK Government’s Grassroots Facilities Fund, with Community Finance Ireland backing the rest. That February the last match was played on the old grass, fittingly a Clarence Cup tie, and by October 2024 a full-size floodlit 3G was open for booking, used morning to night by the club’s teams, the schools and half the sports clubs of the district. The ground Robert Adams built, rebuilt again for his village.

The league has been less kind than the ground. Relegation in 2016 ended a quarter-century association with the top flight, and eight seasons of 1A football followed before promotion in 2025 put Kilmore back in the Premier for the first time in ten years, for one season. Behind the firsts, though, the club has never been deeper. The Swifts, the rebranded continuation of the second eleven that has carried the club’s depth since at least 1977, won the double in 2024–25: champions of 3E and winners of the Templeton Cup, lifted at Seaview after a 5–0 final, then straight up again the following season on the back of 89 goals.

Sixty seasons in, the firsts are rebuilding in 1A under new manager Mark Kerr, appointed in the summer of 2026 with the league’s new Conference tier the stated ambition. The girls’ section grows year on year, and the weekly lotto quietly funds the next chapter, the clubhouse. The story continues, and this project exists so that none of it gets lost again.