Academy manager Dean Wright says it’s great for him to have a first-team boss like Kieran McKenna who takes an interest in young players and also fans enthusiastic about the club’s youth set-up.
McKenna cut his coaching teeth in the academies at Tottenham and Manchester United before moving into the senior management team at Old Trafford and then into the Portman Road hotseat a year ago this Friday.
"He gets it,” Wright told TWTD. "He gets development football, he understands young players because he’s worked with young players and he’s excellent at it as well, the level of his coaching and the way he does things.
"The standards that the first team are setting for everybody at the training ground is what we want.
"That’s great for me and he’s really open to having conversations. A lot of the time he’ll come and ask me about players or we’ll just have a chat about how a player did in training this morning and there is an interest in what we’re doing and that connection from academy to first team.”
In recent seasons, Town have struggled to integrate some of their best academy youngsters into the first team with the likes of Armando Dobra, Tyreece Simpson and Liam Gibbs all moving on before having had too much of a chance in the senior side.
"It’s obviously the hardest one to jump from being an academy player to a first team player and that’s why the percentage of people that actually do it is so low,” Wright reflected.
"Having worked in academy football for a long time now, near enough every club that you go to do good stuff, have got good people, the coaching is generally pretty decent across the board now in academies.
"But the bit that’s always the key point in any academy is that pathway and opportunity. And a lot of clubs, even the biggest of clubs, will have the most fancy facilities, the best of everything but if the person at the top doesn’t pick young players, then it’s all, not wasted as such, but that’s the key bit.
"I think what we’re developing here is a really good environment at the training ground, a really close connection between the first team and academy staff. There’s a massive amount of crossover.
"I can’t speak for how it was before because I wasn’t here and I don’t know but there is a real closeness between the two departments now, it’s not that the first team are over there and we’re over there and we never see each other, there’s conversations happening all the time, there are meetings to discuss players, there’s crossover.
"And every day there’s lads going across. The lads then have to be good enough and if they’re good enough as Cameron [Humphreys] has shown and some of the other lads who have got a little taste of it, then when there are opportunities, they will be given opportunities.
"But the bigger picture for the club in general is that we need to get promoted, don’t we? That’s the ultimate aim I think for everybody that everyone’s pushing towards.
"The manager’s not going to play players don’t help contribute towards that, so we’ve got to make sure that the lads are good enough. I’ll never sit here and moan about opportunity and pathway and things like that if we haven’t got players that are good enough because you wouldn’t do it.
"You’re not going to take somebody in that isn’t good enough. The challenge for us is to make sure we have got players that are good enough, so if there is a gap to be filled, they’re looking at us before they’re looking elsewhere.
"In terms of the games programme, we’ve got to make sure that our players are competing all the way through the pathway with the players that might come in and take their place.
"So rather than looking at somebody from a top-six Premier League club on loan, hopefully at some point we’ll already have one here, so they won’t have to look at that player. We’ll have one of our own here ready to make that jump.
"And that’s the challenge for us, to make sure that we’re doing that and making sure we’re constantly trying to push the boundaries to be as we can be, play the best games that we possibly can, try and expose the player to the best level of competition.
"Make sure the coaching programme is as good as it can be, make sure our physical programme is as good as it can be, make sure we’re got regular communication and dialogue with the key people so if we have somebody that’s showing promise that people know about them and know about them early and we can then devise a plan and a path to give them the right exposure to make sure they get to where we want them to get to.
"But it is always about pathway and opportunity for young players and that’s what we have to create. We have to make sure that is there but it will only be there and it will only maintain if the players are good enough.”
Given the club’s traditions for bringing through young players, fans are interested in the academy and who might be next off the conveyor belt, and Wright relishes that attention.
"I think it contributes to realising how big this club is,” he reflected. "That level of interest and knowledge that the fans have got in our young players is great for the kids, great for us.
"From a personal point of view, it gives me a sense of responsibility in terms of there being people interested in this and who genuinely want it to do well.
"I would say there is an enthusiasm for sitting in the stadium at three o’clock on a Saturday and seeing a Cam Humphreys or a Luke Woolfenden or another young local player playing in the team.
I do feel that here that there is an enthusiasm for that to happen, so there is a responsibility on me to make sure it does.
"And it’s great, I’m always open with stuff like that. There are a lot of clubs where there wouldn’t be much interest in the academy, it’s just something that exists there and I’ve worked at a club [Huddersfield] that decided to get rid of their academy, which in my opinion was a horrendous decision.
"But was something that they chose to do, which is the opposite of what I would advocate for any club that has got local young players that want to play for their local team. The academy is the path to do that.
"I do feel that here there’s a enthusiasm, a support, a willingness to help make that happen and make sure the next Cam Humphreys is on the way soon and the next one after that and so on and so on.”
Further instalments of TWTD's in-depth interview with Wright can be found at these links: