Upon confirming several key appointments, including Mark Yates as Director of Football along with his existing first team managerial responsibilities, the club's vice-chairman wanted to clarify the structure with the following statement:

"With planning for the new season well underway, and as part of a series of updates regarding the changes and progress we are making at the club, we would like to share with you a copy of the new football structure that we have at the football club. This goes to show the depth of the club and the breadth of areas that we now cover from a footballing aspect.

Whether boys or girls, the dream of progressing to either our men's or women's first team sits at the forefront of what we do. The ability to promote youth team players through the system in to adult football is and still remains a priority to Stourbridge Football Club.

In respect of the lads football, and in order to further enhance these opportunities plus to improve our offering to our academy, youth and under 18's team players, we have decided to run with two mid-week floodlit teams playing in the Midland Floodlit Youth League. We believe this will give us the greatest opportunity to encourage the best quality students on to our academy programme with Dudley College, as well as continuing the success of our existing youth team.

The academy team will be called Stourbridge FC, managed by Simon King with the football club youth team running as Stourbridge AFC and managed by Phil Clinton. Both of these sides will then feed into our Stourbridge under 21's team (Team Dudley), to allow for our under 18's players to get adult football experience.

Where players are seen to be exceptional, they then will be fast tracked to first team training where our newly appointed Director of Football and first team manager, Mark Yates, will assess them for either our own needs, or indeed for short-term loan arrangements at clubs playing at steps 4 or 5 respectively. The intention will then always be that we are hoping to bring them back to play in our own first team. We believe this is the best pathway and opportunity that we have offered to all our junior players to date. With the stewardship of myself, Andy Pountney (Chairman) and Mark Yates, we believe this will give us a blueprint for success.

To begin to mirror this position within our ladies and girls section, we have now added to the programme a women's second team playing in the Birmingham County League. This side will be headed up by Ellie Gough, under the stewardship of Andy Fisher, our ladies first team manager and Mike Harris, our head coach. This will mean that our under 18 girls, headed up by Daz Barnes, will have a great opportunity to progress in to adult football with a view to being part of our first team squad.

Discussions regarding an under 18 academy with Dudley College are ongoing, and we hope to be able to piece this together for the 2021-22 season.

We are extremely proud of what we have achieved in developing both a community club and pathway for all our junior players, and believed it was necessary to share this with you.

Please keep safe, and we look forward to seeing you all as soon as we possibly can."

Here's the link to the flowchart of the new footballing structure;

https://documentcloud.adobe.com/link/track?uri=urn:aaid:scds:US:44a2c8ee-b922-4b17-9f1e-31f0c0e7bd07