Academy update

The academy has experienced numerous changes following the club’s return to the Football League and academy manager Neil Cluxton offered an overview for the fans, focusing on the three main teams.
“There’s been some big changes. We’re currently competing on about four or five fronts,” he said.
“We’ve still got all the teams linked with the Trust playing in the National Education leagues and we’re still accessing their players on a weekly basis.
“Now we’re back in the Football League, we’re back in the EFL Youth Alliance League, which is an U18 league.
“The games are predominantly on Saturday mornings, but we’re playing quite a lot on a Friday morning down at Sheffield Hallam University.
“We’re doing okay, we had a tough start with a couple of heavy defeats but we’ve found our feet a little bit and become really hard to score against.
“We can play three over-18s as well (in the U18 league) and that’s really helped us.”
The U18s currently sit eighth out of 25 teams in the north division, are unbeaten in the Youth Alliance Cup group stage and are into the second round of the FA Youth Cup after a 1-0 victory over Walsall in round one.
Another of the academy teams is the U23 development squad, competing in the National Football Youth League, which Neil described as: “Predominantly an education league – it’s made up of universities, private academies and non-league clubs.
“We’ve been a non-league club for the last six years and that league has served us well so we’ve still got players playing in that and we’ve had a good start.”
Neil then discussed the Central League, traditionally a reserve league, that the club are competing in this season alongside the Central League Cup: “It’s very strong, there’s about ten teams in it.
“We’ve played three games (one league, two cup) and we’ve lost two and won one. We lost narrowly to Grimsby in the cup, had a heavy league defeat away to Huddersfield who had a really strong team out and then we played Notts County recently and beat them 2-0 to get off the mark in the cup group stage.
“That team is a mixture of players, sometimes there’s some involvement from the first team which is great.
“Otherwise, we’re tasked with putting a youth team out really. It’s hard but we’ve entered it because it’s really going to develop our players, it’s stretching and challenging them so there’s going to be some tough fixtures, but long-term it will really benefit our players.”
Discussing the robust relationship between the academy and the first team, Neil added: “There’s a great pathway at the club. The first-team staff and the gaffer since they came in have been fantastic with our young players and with our academy staff.
“We get players going up to support the first team in training on a regular basis and our staff are welcome to go and observe the training and we try and replicate as much of it as we can.
“We just try and do everything that the first team do, there’s no point trying to do anything else.
“It’s a really good working relationship, we’re communicating daily and our young players are relishing the opportunity to go and train.
“The players who got professional contracts last year: Liam Jessop, Ali Mohiuddin and Ashton Rinaldo, they came back and played against Notts County reserves in our Central League Cup fixture.
“It was great to see them being role models for our younger players and hopefully that will continue for the rest of the season.”
Former Spireite Haydn Hollis has returned to the club in a coaching capacity with the U18s and echoed Neil’s words on the relationship with the first team, saying: “The staff are still the same from when I was a player, so I get on with them very well anyway.
“I spoke to ‘Bucky’ and ‘Webby’. The gaffer’s been brilliant with me since I’ve come in. He told me what he expects in terms of getting them into good habits and I think I’ve done that.
“They work, they give everything they’ve got and that’s the bare minimum that you can ask from them.”
The U18s’ next fixture sees them take on Bradford City away in the Youth Alliance League on Friday, November 8.
The reserves’ next game, and the FA Youth Cup second round fixture, will be announced in due course on social media.