Tranmere Rovers Apprentices were featured on the BBC’s North West Today and North West Tonight programmes yesterday as part of the week-long celebration of Apprenticeships.
The feature highlighted the work conducted by LFE and the Club to provide Apprentices with a programme that combines a football development programme with work based learning and education.
The Advanced Apprenticeship in Sporting Excellence (AASE) is designed to give Apprentices the best opportunity of building and maintaining a career as a professional footballer through a structured development programme, while the education element provides Apprentices with an opportunity to gain recognised academic qualifications that complement the football programme.
Areas such as psychology, diet and nutrition, fitness and lifestyle directly link to the training and qualifications the Apprentices undertake.
Previous graduates of this programme include current first team squad members Craig Curran, Terry Gornell, Aaron Cresswell, Ryan Fraughan and Ash Taylor.
(Ex Apprentice Peter Kennedy at Tranmere Rovers Learning Centre)
While the Club has an excellent record of promoting players from their youth ranks to professional status, Assistant Manager, Sean Garnett was also keen to extol the virtues of the education programme which has seen the former Apprentices such as Peter Kennedy and Gerwyn Jones move in to Higher Education, he said;
“While we are very proud of the record we have here in terms of producing players, from day one of the Apprenticeship we instil the importance of the education side of things to all our players.”
“The statistics have shown that the chances of maintaining a long term career in the game are slim so we push the lads to do their best on and off the pitch, by doing this the lads can then prepare to make the next step if things don’t work out football wise.”
“The likes of Peter and Gerwyn are great examples of this, one is training to become a PE Teacher while the other has been able to go out to the USA on a Soccer Scholarship.”
