My mum and dad were always quite encouraging of playing sport. As soon as I was walking I was running so in primary school and high school I played everything and anything.

My mum and dad were both quite sporty. Me and my brother would play football with dad in the park, we would play badminton as a family. Which sounds really sad looking back on it now! Friday nights playing badminton together.

I also played tennis, netball, basketball, athletics all through university, too. I was mostly a sprinter and a jumper and I represented Perth and my county. I ended up getting an athletics scholarship when I was 17 so I spent a year at a high school in New York. It was spent at the Stony Brook School in Long Island and for the first semester I did athletics which included up at 7am training and competing at the weekends, then the second semester I did basketball.

I was always quite obsessed with America and hankered to go to school there. It was partly to do with my interest in sport as I watched a lot of basketball. The atmosphere looked incredible so to actually live it was amazing. It was everything I had hoped for. Going to see the Nicks at Madison Square Garden was just incredible.

Going to The Garden is something else, but it’s not quite McDiarmid Park, the home of my beloved St Johnstone. My dad and brother were big fans and the two of them would always go. It would cause me to moan a lot, so eventually I talked them into it. When I got older I’d tag along with my brother before I convinced some of my school friends to come along.

They say you never forget your first game, and that’s true enough here. Perhaps for all the wrong reasons, though: It was abandoned at half-time. It was the early Nineties against Motherwell, it was 0-0, and it was called off at half-time because of the snow. That was enough for me to be bitten by the bug.

Supporting a team like St Johnstone is different to following a big team. On a Saturday night my brother would watch Match of the Day with the English teams, but I liked the local nature of it. Even as a little girl you would get the players coming round signing your programme, you felt it was a community. McDiarmid Park was a home from every second Saturday.

Alan Main used to always be my favourite. My brother would always say to me ‘You can’t have a goalkeeper as your favourite player!’ and I didn’t understand it. I would end up changing my mind every other week when I spoke to my brother but it was always Alan Main.

He was a local hero to me. I never met him, which is very sad come to think of it. Maybe I’ll meet him one day!

Now working in London with Sky Sports, it can be a tricky business seeing St Johnstone as much as I’d like. However, I was there at Celtic Park on May 17 three years ago to see them lift the Scottish Cup. I managed to swap my shift at the last minute.

I thought if they win and I don’t go I’d always regret it for the rest of my life, but if I go and they lose I’m going to be gutted. In the end, I knew deep down I had to go in case it never, ever happened again. I got the earliest train from Kings Cross up to Glasgow and went with my brother, his friends and my cousins.

It was incredible. As a St Johnstone fan, and a Scotland fan, you are not used to seeing your team have success! I remember when the second goal went in against Dundee United, it just felt as if it was too good to be true.

What I loved was the atmosphere. The next day we went to the trophy parade through Perth and I’ve never seen the place like that. Even people who weren’t football fans were out in the street, St Johnstone flags were on lamp posts, they were on roundabouts, everyone got behind the team. It was brilliant to be part of that bit of history.

My Sporting Saturdays now are quite different. I do get the odd one off but more or less I’m on every weekend. I tend to do shifts on a Saturday evening but I’ll come in around 3pm. If I wasn’t working my Saturday would probably be the same as I’d be watching Soccer Saturday through the TV! It’s nice to get paid to come in and watch the games.

I tend to do the 9pm to midnight shift rounding up all the goals from across all the leagues. It’s not much of a Saturday night out but I’m used to it, it’s nice having a Tuesday off.

I probably get a buzz going to a game more now because I don’t get back that often. When you do get to go there is always something quite magical about it. Even when I went to Murrayfield for the Autumn Tests last year, it was one of the first times it felt like I was pitch side watching live sport. You get that used to seeing it through a TV. That’s what it is all about, I still get the thrill of seeing it live.

Sky Sports’ Scottish football coverage includes live action from the SPFL, William Hill Scottish Cup and Scotland’s 2018 FIFA World Cup Qualifiers.