YORK City welcomed back their squad for the first day of pre-season training this morning.

Manager Adam Hinshelwood has begun his pre-season preparations after welcoming back the first-team squad, with up to four academy players involved in the first day of training.

Hinshelwood is delighted to be back in training after enjoying his Summer, and would explain what the coaching staff’s plans are on their return.

“I always like to have six weeks build-up to the first game, this gets the testing out of the way and gets them a little bit of a feel of the ball, a bit of movement on Friday and it’ll be their last weekend off for a long while," Hinshelwood explained.

“I like to give them that, everyone’s feeling well and on Monday we’ll do two weeks build-up to our first pre-season game.

“We can build up everything and if the tests come back and we need a little bit more work in the legs, then we’ll know all of that from the first couple of days.

“It’s six weeks of build-up, and these first couple of days allow us to get our testing out of the way.

“Within the first two days they will be getting their boots out and on the ball, so that they can familiarise themselves with it again.


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“Going back over the years you probably wouldn’t touch the ball, just straight line running, and then you get into the first game and on the turn your groin is going.

“We’ll go over all of that into them nice and early, we want to be a team that has the ball for large parts of the games so it is important that we get them used to that.”

Hinshelwood will hold his players to a level of expectancy as well, hoping that standards remain high, with the City boss believing that his players should be returning to the squad in near enough peak fitness.

The York manager also confirmed the appointment of new first-team physiotherapist Sam Mannings, who arrives after a stint with Worthing and Hampshire Cricket.

Hinshelwood admitted: “The days of having eight weeks off and not doing nothing are sort of gone a little bit now, you’ve got to be coming into pre-season with a level of fitness.

“That’s just the norm and is what is expected of everybody now.

“We’ll do our testing in the first couple of days and see where everyone is, but we’re hoping that they’re in a good place and we can ramp training up really quickly.

“We had a meeting with them as soon as the [last] season finishes and tell them our plans moving forward, then it’s just a case of giving them a start date for when they are due to report back.

“Cam [Morrison, first-team coach] and the new physio Sam [Mannings, first-team physio] have been in for the last few weeks putting on sessions for anyone who wants extra sessions, it’s been good to see one or two that didn’t feature heavily coming and doing extras.

“Sam’s got straight into it and has been with us for two weeks now, he’s happy with how the injured boys are progressing.

“We’ll have some new signings coming back that we haven’t quite got to work with yet.”