Academy boss Awford: Luton have been fantastic with their young stars during coronavirus pandemic

Luton Academy & Development manager Andy Awford has thanked the club for their ‘fantastic’ support during the coronavirus pandemic.

Like most other academies, the Hatters had to shut down their operations when the country went into lockdown back in March.

They have managed to re-open once more as best as they can in recent months, as Awford, himself an ex-player at Portsmouth, a club he also managed at one stage, said: “The football club have been fantastic in the support that the academy have received from everybody, the board, from Gary (Sweet, chief executive), from everybody.

“In the first lockdown there was furlough and that was very difficult where everything stopped, we got to March and it just shut down.

“We restarted our 18s and 21s at the end of July after the first team had finished their games to stay up which was brilliant, then the schoolboys came back in when they went back to school in September.

“The football club have been fantastic, they’ve supported us right the way through with the staff and the support they’ve needed as it’s new for everybody.”

Awford admitted he has been somewhat in the dark about just how to manage the situation at first as it was a completely unprecedented experience.

He continued: “As academy manager, you’re going into something that you don’t know a lot about, there’s nothing on the courses.

“So you needed to talk things through and needed extra time to work it out.

“We did that, and all academy managers were very good in terms of getting on Zoom calls together.

“It was nice that you had your peers to call upon and talk things through with.

“But the football club has been brilliant in allowing us to continue as best as we can.”

One thing that has changed is the amount of time the younger age-groups are allowed to spend at the Brache, which is something Awford felt has been tough.

He said: “The U18s have been slightly reduced, not so much in terms of training hours, more the things around it.

“So whereby we would normally do their education, their analysis, their gym programmes, their reviews, face to face at the Brache, they’re coming in now, training, doing some light outdoor gym work and then they’re gone.

“They jump on Zoom for individual meetings with staff or whatever’s needed, so that’s been different, but the guidelines are not to have people in for any amount of time that isn’t essential.

“The same with the 21s, they come in, train in the morning and then they’re out of the way as well.

“From my point of view, I’ve missed that interaction with them in the afternoon.

“You build relationships with players away from the pitch sometimes, so that’s been a little bit strange for me.

"But we’re fortunate, some academies still aren’t back and we’ve had full support from everybody at the club which has been brilliant.”

"My staff have been excellent, the academy staff have just got on with it really and whatever barriers have put up in front of us through nobody’s fault, we’ve done our very best as a collective to try and break those barriers down and find solutions to the problems that we’re now facing."

With mental health such a big talking point these days, particularly during lockdown, Awford confirmed the academy staff did take extra steps to making sure none of the players were suffering.

He added: "We did assessments on all the boys when they came back, did questionnaires with them, how they were feeling as player A is totally different to player B.

"Player A might have at home all the facilities and all the resources to do a gym programme, a swimming pool, whatever, some might not.

"Somebody else might have had a bad Covid experience, some might have had family losses, so we had to make sure we knew what we were dealing with from that point of view and we did that quite well I think.

"We talked to as many people as we could, the staff were brilliant, even during furlough we were able to check in with the boys on regular occasions.

"There were Zoom quizzes, staff quizzes, stuff that the young academy boys were doing on Twitter was amazing and I’ve got to be honest, sometimes they kept me going at times.

"Our responsibility was to pump them up and make sure they’re okay and on occasions I'd be seeing some of those on Twitter or a link that was sent to me and it was great, that’s brilliant and it gives you a little bit of a spark.

"So that was really good, we've had a lot to factor in but in the true Luton way, we've managed to find a way to knock those barriers down and that is credit to the whole football club."