Mincher: It's a Special Group Wednesday, 6th Jul 2022 17:41 Town performance coach Kevin Mincher has been outlining his role at the club, having joined as a consultant last summer. Mincher, 44, previously worked on a similar basis at Bristol City, where performance director Andy Rolls, CEO Mark Ashton and a number of others on the Town staff were employed prior to last summer. “The title I’ve got at the club is as a performance coach and that’s really a unique position at Ipswich Town,” he told iFollow Ipswich. “In various sports, you’ll be familiar with a role that people might call sports psychology and I often get chunked into that category, but the truth is that I’m not a sports psychologist. “I do have knowledge and expertise in that area around dealing with the mind and the emotions, but for me in my role it’s more than that, it’s about team dynamics, leadership and communication and a whole load of different things.” He added: “Over the years you start to build more connections and relationships and I ended up working with Mark Ashton and Andy Rolls at other clubs that they’d been at before. “When they came here a year ago I was delighted that they gave me a call and asked if I’d come and help us build a culture and help develop the sports psychology, the ‘emotional fitness’, as I call it, not just of our players but our wider staff. “Not just the first team but through the academy and the rest of the club as well. It’s a real privilege to be here.” Mincher, a former youth player at Sheffield United whose career was ended by a back injury at 17, has been impressed by the squad he has been working with at Town: “It’s a special group, and I don’t say that lightly, that’s not me trying to feed something out to the fans.” Doncaster-born Mincher, who also works as an education consultant via his Unstoppable Teen organisation, was first noticed by fans due to his distinctive footwear. “It’s all a little bit of an accident,” he recalled. “It was something which happened in some schools where I once had a pair of yellow shoes and then it became an expectation that I’d wear them and if I didn’t wear them people were disappointed - ‘You’re not wearing them, where are they?’. “Of course, when I came to Ipswich I thought, I’ve got a bit of a problem here because the old rivals up the road wear yellow. “In colour psychology, yellow is a colour of confidence of self-esteem, of happiness, so with my role that’s important but the other connection for me was that I grew up during the Bobby Robson era so the first Ipswich Town teams I got to see were the ones which were winning trophies and their away kit at that time was yellow. “So it’s my little nod to the past that we want to work together as a group and bring some of those glory years back. The yellow has stayed and I’m well aware and hopefully it’s not caused too much offence, but it’s a good bit of banter around the group and around the place.” Speaking about Mincher's role in March, manager Kieran McKenna said: “He has an all-encompassing role really,” McKenna said. “He helps a lot with the development of the culture of the club, he works with everything from boardroom level with Mark [Ashton] on the bigger picture, helping him with the vision and the culture of the football club, to working with the academy players on a group and individual basis on different performance aspects, especially from a psychological view that he can help them with. “He tends to be in and around the first-team group a couple of days a week, helps with some individual players who enjoy speaking to him about different aspects of performance and he’s also involved in some group sessions.”
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