In the Centre of Excellence we have only just finished pre-season. It has been a long, busy and interesting one where we started back during the first week in July.

During this time our teams have played Arsenal, Ipswich, West Brom, Norwich, Millwall, Crystal Palace and Charlton Athletic in this country.

In August, our under-15s entered the Brondby Cup in Denmark where we finished 5^th and our under-14s have just returned from the Genoa Cup in Italy where they made the final - losing to the hosts Genoa.

All in all, we haven't wasted a day and have even found the time to host two open trial days where over 300 players were assessed by Mark Bonner and I and his team of scouts.

From the trial days 10 players are now starting 6 week trials with the under-9s to 16s Centre of Excellence whilst many showed enough potential to attend either our shadow or elite squads.

All sessions for the Centre of Excellence have now restarted at King Edmund School and in the next seven days all parents will attend an age group open evening with myself, where they will be given a centre handbook for the season and informed by myself on the organisation and aims for the Centre of Excellence for the season ahead.

It will also gives parents an opportunity to ask any questions.

Following the first team game today, all youth staff are attending a meeting. This includes full time, administration, scouts, coaches, medical, physical conditioning and goalkeeping coaches. All subjects will be covered, but mainly it will be about how we have performed in pre-season and what we can do to improve.

We are an open minded group of staff in the Centre of Excellence with high standards to find, coach and work with the best. Therefore, we all meet regularly to review what we are doing.

Once all meetings are finished and handbooks have been distributed, it is back to the day to day running of the centre, where we have increased our contact training time this year with all under-9s through to under-13s three times a week for a total of six hours.

Our under 14s and 16s training is on two occasions per week with one of those sessions being a day release from school - giving those players a total of seven hours training time.

Along with our games programme, European tours and homework programme, this certainly means that we are doing all we can to get all our players to the next level.

Enjoy the game

Luke Hobbs
Centre of Excellence Manager