Who’s the bloke with the yellow shoes on the Town bench, fans have asked over the course of the season. That man is performance coach Kevin Mincher.
Mincher is employed by the Blues on a part-time consultancy basis, working with the players on positivity and mental aspects of the game.
He has been at Town since the beginning of the season after being brought in by performance department having previously worked on a similar basis at Bristol City, where performance director Andy Rolls, CEO Mark Ashton and a number of others on the Town staff were employed prior to last summer.
Having been spotted in the dugout, as he was at Fleetwood on Saturday, or loitering at the end of the tunnel at Portman Road, supporters on social media have wondered who the man with the distinctive yellow shoes might be.
Doncaster-born Mincher was a youth player with Sheffield United but a back injury ended his time as a player with the Blades at 17 in the early 1990s.
Since then he has had spells as a youth coach with the Blades, with local non-league side Sheffield FC as a player and working in the US with youth side the Erie Admirals as assistant manager, as well as founding training camps in various US states and New Zealand.
Since 1997, Mincher has also worked to help young people achieve their potential through his Unstoppable Teen organisation via seminars, which have been attended by more than 300,000 teenagers, a book, website and blog.
According to the Unstoppable Teen website, "for over 25 years, Kevin Mincher has been helping athletes, coaches and sports teams achieve their goals. He is an innovator in the field peak performance”.
He has worked a one-to-one performance coach to athletes in cricket, ice hockey and other sports in addition to football and is the creator of more than 20 performance coaching programmes for athletes and coaches.
Mincher has worked in "sports psychology and emotional fitness with clubs including Sheffield United, Hull City, Nottingham Forest, Rotherham United and Sheffield Steelers [ice hockey]” and was a scout with Watford. The site says he has also worked on image rights deals with Inter Milan.
Young Business Person of the year in 2001 and included in the Who's Who of Britain's Young Entrepreneurs in 2002, Mincher has published a number of books, including Inner Winner and Confident With Cash in 30 Minutes.