Swindon Town Chairman Jed McCrory and Operations Manager Mark Isaacs believe that plans to develop a new training ground will help the club’s youth system to thrive and produce even more players for the first-team.
The Robins are due to meet with Calne Town Council today alongside an architect involved in the scheme to finalise the proposals to transform the Beversbrook Sports and Community Facility, Calne into a outstanding training ground.
The plans include a gymnasium, seminar rooms for the first-team and youth-team, changing rooms, a boot room and a number of new pitches, all of which are a vast improvement on the club’s current facilities at Liddington.
Following today’s meeting the project will move on to the planning stage, and after positive early discussions the club are hopeful of beginning the building phase at the start of July with the aim of moving in at the start of October.
Isaacs believes the new centre will provide facilities of Championship standard for the League One side.
“It would be a 100 times improvement on where we are today and the current facilities we can use, and we have had conversations about how we can improve going forwards because the facilities we have today are nowhere near what an academy or first-team would need,” he told the Swindon Advertsier.
“We will be in line with high end Championship clubs in terms of what the complex will deliver, and we have already seen this season that we have three or four players come from the youth set-up into the first team, and in the future this will enable that to happen even more.”
“We have a high percentage of fans in Swindon, but if you look at places like Calne, Chippenham and Devizes and the outer parts of Swindon, there is a huge amount of interest in the club and our catchment area is quite vast.”
Chairman Jed McCrory believes the investment in these new facilities will ensure that the club’s youth-system continues to flourish.
“This is the platform for the club going forward, with the youth development and the way that Kevin (Macdonald) wants to do it. There is a bit more privacy as well which we are looking forward to,” he said.
“There will be a gym there and a canteen, private facilities for the players to train in privacy, and there will also be a couple of training pitches.”
“We have put a lot of work in, and we have been here 15 or 16 weeks and been into a consultation for six of them which followed three or four weeks of work, so we did that more or less immediately after we got here.”
“We saw the way the youth system was, and the youth boys have done a tremendous job to bring the youth players through so far with the facilities we’ve had, but we were aware we needed to update and if we are looking to put this club on a sustainable model we have to have better training facilities, and that’s what we have done.”
