Town manager Kieran McKenna says if Town want to be a club which operates at the higher echelons, then they need a training ground which matches those ambitions, CEO Mark Ashton having announced a multi-million pound upgrade of Town’s Playford Road facility at last night’s Fans’ Forum.
Town have been at Playford Road and Bent Lane sites either side of the road since the mid-1990s with the club initially leasing before buying the land in 2001.
The main building at Playford Road was initially an academy facility when opened in 2001 but over the years has increasingly been taken over by the first team while still in use by the youngsters and also in more recent seasons the women’s team.
Asked whether he has given Ashton a list of what he’d like from a training ground from his experiences at his previous clubs and what he’s seen elsewhere, McKenna said: "Those discussions are ongoing, I’ll have input into what I think would be not just essential for what I want or what I like, it’s more about the future of the football club and where we want to bring the football club and what legacy we want to leave behind maybe many years down the line when I’m not here.
"Part of that is that if we want to be a top football club and operate at the higher echelons of the game, then we need a training facility which is suitably matches that.
"There’s definitely work to be done. The owners have been fantastic in supporting myself and the changes that myself and the staff have wanted to make within the building that we have here over the last 18 months, have been fantastic in terms of support in the need for new training pitches and fencing that we now have.
"But I think we’re still in the position where it’s a building which was built for the academy and now we have the men’s team, the women’s team and the academy age groups all sharing out of the same building and we’re in a Portakabin as we speak.
"The club has managed well with the Portakabins but to get to where we want to get to eventually, having a more state-of-the-art, purpose-built first-team training facility would be beneficial for now and for the future of the club.”
But be believes the grounds themselves have great potential: "We’ve got a really good site in a lovely part of the country where we’re lucky to get nice weather.
"We’ve got a really good site and we have training pitches now that are of a really high level that help the club.
"We’ve done lots of internal work to the buildings that are here that have brought them up to spec, but there’s still [more work to be done].
"We know what areas of the training ground we want to develop and there’s still land that we can use to hopefully develop another building.
"There’s certainly scope here and the foundations to develop the training ground on this site and hopefully we will have a facility which is excellent for the first team but also for the ladies team and excellent for the academy where they can all thrive for years to come.”