Burton Albion want to make the pathway from academy to first-team as straightforward as possible - and that is showing in their pre-season preparations.
Joe Sbarra, Ben Fox and Marcus Harness are all expected to play substantial roles for the Brewers in League One next season after coming through the ranks at the Pirelli Stadium, while academy graduates Reece Hutchinson and Callum Hawkins signed their first professional contracts in May.
With Albion dropping out of the Championship, the budget has been tightened and the squad streamlined, meaning Burton's young players are likely to get more involvement.
As academy manager Dan Robinson put it: "I've said it (relegation) will be a positive effect for us in a bizarre way in that the relationship will be even tighter, because there will be even more reliance on our young players coming through. The gap is shortened almost."
And the Brewers coaching staff are making sure the next generation of players are ready for the step-up by putting the young academy squad through the same intense pre-season routines as the senior side.
"The academy mirror our pre-season, so they'll be up next doing Carsington Water," sports scientist Chris Beardsley, who was with the first-team during their workout at the Derbyshire reservoir last week, told the club website.
"Every session we do that is away from the football club, they will do, they'll mirror it.
"Whether it be track, a pool session, whether it's out and about up here at Carsington, the under-18s will do the exact same session.
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"They'll know the distances, the times, they'll run in the same sorts of groups as we do.
"So when they do have the step up, like we've seen with Ben Fox, Joe Sbarra, now Reece Hutchinson, these boys can deal with it physically.
"Because we don't want to have kids that come into our environment and they're already behind.
"We want to give them the best possible chance that when they come in, physically they're right, all they've got to do then is step up with the football and get up to the speed of first-team football.
"We believe it's massively important for us to produce lads that are going to play in our first-team, that we give them the right tools physically to be able to cope with it."
That philosophy passes to the football side, too, with Albion's young teams often playing matches with the same systems and styles as the first-team.
