Blues boss Paul Jewell says double Olympic gold medal-winning rower Steve Williams will prove to be a really good signing for Town. The 36-year-old won gold in the coxless fours both in Athens in 2004 and at the 2008 Beijing Games and has also climbed Everest and walked to the North Pole.
Jewell believes Williams, who will focus on players’ fitness development and match preparation while working alongside fitness coach Andy Liddell, will have a significant role to play: "I think he’ll bring in an awful lot.
"He’s a part-time consultant at the moment but I think the job will evolve. It’s almost ground-breaking really.
"When I met him in the summer and I found out what he’d done, it was quite unbelievable. He’ll help Andy Liddell in the strengthening and conditioning, but also he’ll help players with mental toughness.
"If you’re going to climb Everest and win two gold medals and walk to the North Pole you’ve got to have a mental toughness.
"I spoke to him and he’s really excited about helping the players, not just individually but as a group. I think he’s a really good signing for us.”
The Town manager says Williams’s lack of footballing knowledge isn’t an issue: "It’s something different. He has no football background and doesn’t pretend to have a football background, but he has a sporting background.
"I wouldn’t like to fight him! He’s tough. He’s not here to tell us how to play football but he’s here to help the players and the staff because the stuff that he’s had to go through and the sacrifices he’s had to make to get to the top will be an example to anybody here.”
While Williams will be a new face at Playford Road this season, a familiar face has returned to the club with Bryan Klug coming in as academy director after Sammy Morgan decided to step down.
Jewell paid tribute to the Northern Irishman’s time with Town's youth set-up: "First of all you’ve got to say a big well done to Sammy Morgan, who has done a fantastic job with the academy.
"But with the [EPPP] changeover, I think Sammy thought it might have been a great time for him to step aside. From my point of view, the way the academy was run was top class.”
He says that Klug wasn’t someone he was overly familiar with but was recommended by others at the club: "Once we knew that Sammy might be looking to step down, we looked to Bryan.
"I didn’t know Bryan Klug, I’d not met him but everyone at the football club speaks very highly of him and I knew when I spoke to him and he was interested in the job, he still lives locally, that he was the stand-out candidate.”