Wolves have strengthened their medical and performance department in recent months, as head of high performance Phil Hayward continues to evolve the club.
Hayward, whose one-year anniversary since returning to Wolves was marked on wolves.co.uk last week, now provides a further update, with Stephen Gilpin and Nathan Wolland arriving at Compton Park this season.
Gilpin joined the club from Rotherham United last summer as head of academy sports science and medicine, leading the performance area of the academy. Nathan Wolland, goalkeeper physical performance coach, has also joined Wolves and developed a strength and conditioning philosophy for the goalkeeper department.
Bringing in specialists in specific roles has been part of Hayward’s remit, with Mark Piros-Read also joining as head of physical performance in the winter. The aim is to have an elite way of working which aligns through the men’s and women’s first-teams, as well as the academy, which Hayward explained.
He said: “Over the last year it’s been a phased project. The remit was understanding the way the whole operation works right the way across the club, not just at first-team level, but through the academy, down to the youngest age groups and including women’s and girl’s teams. It's looking at the whole area and seeing how we could work more effectively across the board.
“I spent the back end of last season immersing myself in the academy, which had evolved a lot since the EPP came in around 2014. The academy set up had grown enormously from where it had been before and I’d probably not fully appreciated the scale of that growth, so it was interesting to see things day to day and try to apply some of the best practices I’d seen at first-team level and working abroad, hopefully giving that knowledge to the academy.
“We restructured to work in a slightly different way, and we’ve now got a really strong group leading the academy performance provision. We’ve got some really great people and a really nice mix of specialists in key roles. In the younger ages, we’ve got people who really want to focus on working with young players, which is a unique skillset. In the older groups there are some people who perhaps are a little bit earlier in their careers and want to progress to first-team football but need guidance and support to hone the tools of their trade. It’s almost creating a bit of an academy pipeline from a staffing perspective, the same as we have for academy players.”
At first-team level, the medical and performance department had evolved towards the end of Hayward’s first spell in 2020 and last summer he was adjusting to a new coaching staff following Gary O’Neil’s arrival, allowing him to take ideas and best practices into his own way of working.
“From the beginning of this season, I’ve started to work around the first-team, getting to know the new staff that had been brought on board over the last few years and starting to understand how they’d been working, and not revolutionise things, but gently reshaping things to make us a little bit more efficient in certain areas, and hopefully giving some guidance and support to the really experienced staff that we already have with the first-team.”
With Hugo Bueno and Nathan Fraser progressing from the academy to first-team in recent years, the pathway on the football pitch is clear, and through the work of Hayward, Wolves are now working more efficiently as a medical and performance department, taking the club to the next level.
