This week James McPake’s has been delighted to see the club’s own training ground starting to come to fruition. The astro surface has been commissioned at their Rosyth centre and no longer will he be plagued with questions about when it is coming at supporters’ meetings. He told the website:-
“It’s been in the background for so long, and spoken about for so long. Every fans meeting there’s been questions, and rightly so, because it was a big thing. It’ll just be the astro at the start, but it at least gives us a base.”
For the time being the changing facilities and gym remain at KDM Group East End Park but James revealed that he genuinely doesn’t mind that:-
“The gym here’s fantastic, and I actually like the fact that we’re here quite a lot because it’s a decent stadium. The dressing rooms have been done up, the food and everything’s great, and, no disrespect to Pitreavie, because they were brilliant with us in my time here, the way they’ve helped us, and the way they’ve allowed us to shuffle about with training, but it’s just got a different feel to it, when you know you’re going into your own training venue.”
From his experiences as a player at Hibs and Coventry City James knows how important a club’s own training ground can be but this is the first time that he has had one as a manager:-
“At Dundee we never had our own training base. There were times we were coming off a pitch, United were going on it, at the RPC (Regional Performance Centre) when they weren’t using St Andrews, or because of the weather.
“When you have a place that’s yours, you go down, you can spend as long as you want, you can go back in the afternoon, you don’t need to phone for a pitch, if people need to go down and do extras it’s there. It adds a bit of professionalism in my opinion to the club. Basically, we decide when we’re on that pitch. We decide how long we’re on that pitch for. It’s a fantastic astro, it really is. It’s very similar to Airdrie’s which, I think I came out last season and said, when they put the new one down, it was a really good astro.
“Scaffolding’s up. Training will be filmed every day. Things that seem simplistic and small but, on the grand scheme of things, are huge for developing players in my opinion.”
The manager doesn’t miss the advantage that gives him in trying to persuade players to join Dunfermline Athletic and he hopes that now he can actually show them the facility attracting players will become easier:-
“When I first came to the club, or when I was speaking about coming, I was really excited about the fact that we were getting one. It’s not the reason I came – I would’ve came whether we were never going to get a training pitch, because of this club – but it was something that excited me.
“Your brain just starts working and you can take a group of players doing training when you want, you can do individual work, so you’ve got all that and the chance to do that. That’s what coaches want. You want to coach players, you want to see the development, so that excited me about the club.
“We’ve signed players by saying we’ll be moving to our own training ground, we’ll be doing it, and I’m glad for that sense it’s happened because it’s shown the players that I wasn’t lying to them, that the club wasn’t trying to just pull the wool over their eyes. It’s there.
“The ones we’ve told about that now see it. Now we’ve even got the added advantage of come and meet me for a coffee, I’ll show you about here, which is fantastic. It’s worked a few times, just showing them the gym, how we do things, the dressing rooms. I’ve been on record saying I didn’t realise just how good a stadium this was, because I was only a visiting player, until you work here and you see it.”
Now that he can jump in the car and be at a new Rosyth training ground in five minutes. “Can you imagine it when the grass is down, when the building’s done, or whatever you’re talking to them about? I think it just adds, like I said, a bit of professionalism to the football club.
“Not too many teams in Scotland have got their own training ground. They might have what they call a base. Dundee United have got a base at St Andrews, but it’s not theirs. Hibs have got theirs obviously, Hearts don’t even have it. St Mirren’s is good because it’s theirs, Celtic, Rangers, Aberdeen have obviously got Cormack Park. Yes, it’s still phase one, but it’s happening and it’s ours.”
