Town’s new academy manager Dean Wright has been outlining his role at the club and his aims.
Wright joined the club last month from Norwich City, where he was assistant academy manager, taking over from Lee O’Neill, who left Town at the end of last season having been in the position since 2016.
"I think the academy manager role encompasses the whole operation and it is big role these days,” Wright told iFollow Ipswich.
"My priority would be to set up a team of staff that’s empowered to do their job and for me to support them to do their job as well as they can.
"I think ultimately an academy comes down to its players. Everything we do has got to be about the players and supporting them in their experience and their journey with us and for me the main bits have been around the football stuff, that’s ultimately what we’re here to do and what we’re judged on, but being mindful that there’s a lot more to it than that, making sure we’re operational, the logistics and everything that we run is smooth and efficient and effective.
"Player care, education, all of that stuff is part of it but my outlook on that is to get really good staff, which we’ve got here, and empower them to do the job that they’re the specialists in.
"My job is to support them to be able to do the job as well as they can. But ultimately for me to them focus on the football and make sure we’re doing what we’re ultimately here to do.”
Last season the U23s topped Professional Development League Two South, while the U18s and U16s both won the PDL Cup at their levels. In the previous season the U18s reached the semi-finals of the FA Youth Cup.
However, Wright says team achievement won’t be top of the list during his time in charge at Playford Road.
"I think that sort of stuff is great, it’s great for the players, the experience of competing in leagues and cups and doing well is brilliant,” he said.
"But that, for me, is not the marker of a successful academy and we’ve got to get back to an academy that regularly produces players for our first team, and that is the big driver for us.
"Although we want our teams to compete at every level in every game we play, we want to be competitive, and there’s a natural drive within people to want to win games, that’s great and I would never want to take that away from people, my marker of success is how many players we get into our first team, and if not in our first team how many players we produce for the wider game.
"Everything we do, every department, every member of staff has got to be united in that cause of working towards how we progress players through our system.
"Team-based success is not my priority, if I’m honest, so you might start to see teams that are a little bit younger, players being pushed and progressed through the pathway a little bit quicker because we feel that’s the right thing for them to do and we might sacrifice some short-term team success.
"But hopefully that gives us a longer term goal of seeing local, homegrown players in and around the first-team squad regularly, which is ultimately what we’re here to do.”