Rovers’ head of academy recruitment Simon Cooper hasn’t had your stereotypical career. He didn’t make it as a professional footballer and only came in to coaching through a pub team.

Embroiled in a life of organised crime and drug gang living, he become strangled by a debt-ridden cocaine addiction and by 32 he had suffered a heart attack.

It was at that point he found religion and football, before eventually taking the plunge to give up his job in the construction industry and move in to full-time football. And he admits his unorthodox route in to the game is actually a blessing.

He explained: “When I was younger and in organised crime, I was guiding, influencing and understanding people. This wasn’t from a position of control, but in hindsight it was a transferable skill.

“When you’re addicted to drugs, you’re not in control. You come down to a level where you’re broken. You feel like you’ve got nowhere to go and like you’ve been plunged into darkness.

“The one positive, in a way, is that you find the light within yourself and you find things out about yourself you didn’t know.

“When I hit rock bottom; I read a book called The Power of Your Subconscious Mind by Dr Joseph Murphy which absolutely blew me away. I started thinking differently and putting certain elements of the book into practice. It’s basically a coaching manual when you read it, but from another level.”

Cooper said his heart attack was the realisation that he must turn his back on the life he’d been leading and use his experience to guide others away from the paths he had taken. And it was from that he found football coaching as his voice to do that.

“The first team I worked with was a pub team called Marine FC in Failsworth in Manchester,” he said.

“My mate ran the team and they were struggling at the bottom of the league. I phoned him up and I asked him if he needed a hand.

“I changed a lot of things they were doing. I planned the training and made it more fun, we brought a couple of new young players in. The results started to pick up and because of this, I got approached by other football clubs.”

From there he volunteered at Stockport County, becoming assistant youth team coach, before going to take a head of recruitment role at Accrington Stanley, coaching 13-16-year-olds at Manchester City, and head of academy coaching at Oldham Athletic. Then came the move to Rovers.

“My role is mainly focused on academy recruitment, but I also do coaching sessions once a week with the advanced training groups which I love,” he said.

The role of academies has been under threat at some clubs who have taken the option to scale down their youth coaching, though Rovers remain committed to funding their Category One academy which continues to thrive.

Rovers have had many success stories coming through their Brockhall training centre, with as many as five Academy graduates in a matchday squad this season.

But Cooper insists what works for one player doesn’t always work for the next, and stressed the importance of coaches, and their methods, being flexible.

“The biggest problem I have is when people build a profile of a player based on another player who’s been successful,” he said, speaking to Insure4Sport about the importance of grass roots coaching.

“If they’ve worked with a left back for two or three years, they want the next left back they work with to be the same, but it shouldn’t work like that.

“If you look at a cheetah and a gazelle, they can run the same speed, but they have different attributes. The exact same principle should apply when we’re looking at footballers.

“You can’t pigeonhole a player, or you run the risk of losing talent. One day, you’re going to find a player who doesn’t match your club’s philosophy, but if they score 35 goals a season, you need to analyse their game and adjust to it.”

His philosophy on coaching is to focus on making yourself, and the young player, better by each session. He knows more than most the pitfalls with life outside the game, but says keeping players feeling the love for football is the most important thing that coaches must do.

He added: “You’ll find lots of technical players in academies up and down the country. They’re all given a chance at that level. The problem is when they get to 20 to 21 and come out of Under-23s football.

“If they’re at a Premier League or Championship club and not playing for the first team, they go and play lower league football where it’s back to front or down the sides. They get poor service to feet, run around winning second balls and play in an environment where there is not a lot of patience.

“In many instances, players then quit and fall out of love with the game. Football as collective needs to address this issue.

“We have some top-quality technical players in this country who are falling out of love with the game. I’ve seen it happen a lot during my time in football. They might not be good enough for the top clubs, but they can still have good careers if they’re provided with the right environment in which to succeed.”