WHEN chairman Stewart Day took the reins at Bury in the summer of 2013, he immediately set about re-starting the club’s production line of young talent.

Director Ian Kendall was installed as head of youth and charged with turning Day’s dreams into a reality.

Just 18 months down the line, the move is already bearing fruit, with results improving across the board, from Under-9s right up to Ryan Kidd’s successful U18s side.

Kendall has overseen some major changes, from the way the club identifies and attracts the region’s top talent to installing groundbreaking techniques to develop those young players, both mentally and physically.

One of the most unique innovations is a project called “talking tactics”, which is designed to give young academy hopefuls a genuine matchday experience.

“Before the home games, we are bringing in many of the Under-12s upwards into the club so they can have exactly the same pre-match talk as the first team about the first team opposition on that day,” he said.

“They see the same DVD (about the opposition), they see how the first team is going to play.

“They have a pasta lunch and then they go up and watch the game then come back in at half time.

“The coaches ask: ‘Has it gone according to plan? Did it go how we said it was going to go? Who played well, who has not played so well? Who should we start changing round on the pitch?’

“They get exactly the same treatment as the first team get. Other people aren’t doing that and that is starting to make a difference.”

Bury’s production line starts with Jonathan Walsh, appointed last summer to help identify and attract young players.

Rather than setting up an extensive network of scouts, Walsh is developing links with local clubs to set up shadow squads, allowing Bury’s coaches to run the rule over prospective academy players for a number of weeks.

“Jonathan has got three teams playing in the Salford Leagues at U9s, U10s and U11s,” he said.

“Unlike Manchester City, who have got 47 scouts in Greater Manchester, we are looking to create more of a partnership with local clubs, trying to get other clubs to feed into us and let them play with our shadow academy squad.

“When they have done that, if they are good enough, then they will migrate into the academy.

“We want to have a good look at them first and then try to get the elite of the elite.”

Once within the Bury youth set-up, the main goal is to prepare them physically and mentally for first-team football, with diet and gym work playing a more important role in the process.

“The worry we have got is when we take an 18-year-old they are often not strong enough,” said Kendal.

“We need to be building for the future so those children coming through on the treadmill are eating the right food, they are getting the right intake, not just having sugar spikes.

“It is about building core strength and preventing injury.

“It all adds to a whole process, it’s not just one little component part we are looking at, we are looking at everything.”

The work to revive the club’s youth set-up is of course only in its infant stages - it will take years to guage the long-term impact.

In the meantime, Kendall’s says his biggest “challenge” is to develop facilities to match the club’s ambitions.

“We have still got some plans to do things that I can’t talk about because they are commercially sensitive, if people heard about what we were doing then the price of the land we are looking at might start going up.

“We were looking at going into partnership with Bury Grammar School and that is still alive, in my mind.”