SHOULD Terry Gornell or Aaron Cresswell break into Tranmere’s first team sometime during the new season, you can bet Shaun Garnett’s smile will grow wider than ever.

As youth team and reserve team coach, the ever-cheerful Garnett supervises the gateway between Rovers’ youth development set-up and the professional ranks.

Eighteen-year-olds Terry Gornell, a striker and Cresswell, a left-back, are Tranmere’s newest professionals, graduates who made it through from a group of six second-year scholars (or trainees) last season and signed full-time contract this summer.

The one-in-three success ratio of the final selection stage is about par for the course at a club where the development of home-produced players is both a necessity and a speciality.

Indeed, without the success of the set-up established by youth development officer Warwick Rimmer 21 years ago, Rovers might not have survived in the form we know today.

As it is, hundreds of young boys from the age of eight years old upwards will gather under the umbrella of the Tranmere School of Excellence over the coming season in the hope of reaching the point, sometime in their futures, at which Gornell and Cresswell secured those professional deals.

The pair understand that a first-year contract is by no means a written guarantee that they can build a career in full-time football.

They know many first-year professionals are not offered a second season.

Some settle for a career in the part-time ranks. Others return to playing for fun at weekends.

Garnett is hopeful that both Gornell and Cresswell have the potential to make this season the first of many as league professionals.

He said: “Terry works really hard at his game and has the will to succeed. He made himself into an accomplished centre forward and last season, playing in the reserves as well as the youth team, he added goals to his game. He was always a tidy player but strikers are judged by their goals.

“I think he has the right attitude and temperament to be a professional.”

Garnett added: “Aaron has great determination. He wants to be a winner in games and on the training ground.

“That’s one of the reasons we made him youth-team captain.

“In the past he had a problem with dissent and he has worked hard to overcome that. He has a good left foot and being around professional players will help him improve.”

In the season about to start, Garnett will have charge of nine second-year professionals and six first-year boys, almost an exact reverse of last season’s balance.

So the line-ups Garnett sends into Football League Youth Alliance games will probably be a little older and more experienced than last season.

And there will be more players pushing to be included alongside the professionals for reserve-team fixtures in the Central League.

Garnett said: “Hopefully we can push the majority of the second-year boys into the reserves and give some of the better under-16s a taste of the youth team during the season.

“It’s down to what the manager wants on what we do from game to game.

“But everything we do here is geared towards progressing players to a higher standard.

“All of the boys have come back this summer keen to succeed, training hard and playing hard in pre-season. It’s our job to push them hard.”

Garnett, a trainee at Prenton Park himself in the late 1980s, went on to have a career as a centre back with Tranmere, Swansea and Oldham and is now in his fifth season as youth team coach.

He added: “Everyone knows the kind of financial difficulties facing clubs at this level.

“Producing our own players can save the club money – but the kids have to be good enough.”