Bath's warm welcome after cold shoulder

They are the chilling words every young professional footballer dreads. "Sorry son," says the manager, more often than not averting his gaze. "You are not going to make it. We're letting you go."

That was how the news was broken to Alex Ball, then a centre-back with his local club, Bristol City, two years ago. "When the boss, Danny Wilson, called me into his office and told me that I didn't have a future with the club and should find somewhere else I was shattered," he admits. "It really hurt. I was 19 years old, and it felt like the end of the world, certainly the end of my career."

But Ball did find somewhere else. Next Saturday he will be appearing in the FA Cup, and helping to make a significant piece of football history, as a member of Team Bath, the football side of Bath University.

When they play away to Barnstaple Town in the preliminary round they will become the first student team to take part in the competition for more than a century. The last were Oxford University, who won the trophy when they beat Royal Engineers in the 1874 final.

How Ball and his fellow members in a team comprising mainly Premiership and Nationwide League rejects have found their feet, and are playing on them again, is a remarkable tale. In most cases they were discarded by the clubs' academies or schools of excellence, but the fact they were not without talent has enabled them to regain their self-esteem, continue playing the game they love and pick up an education at the same time.

Ball is one of 30 young footballers at Bath who combine playing for the university with studying for their Higher National Diploma, which in many cases will lead to a degree course in sports science identical to the one about to be undertaken by the former England and Arsenal captain Tony Adams at Brunel University.

At Bath, and a number of other universities operating a scholarship scheme largely subsidised by the Professional Footballers' Association, who also send a couple of dozen cast-off youngsters to American colleges every year, the emphasis is not only on educated feet, as the head coach, Paul Tisdale, explains: "The programme is specifically designed to cater for young ex-professionals who have been discarded by their clubs but still have ambition to get back into the game and need to train full-time. At the same time they can obtain qualifications and be in the shop window."

Now the university receives as least three or four applications every day, in addition to recommendations from the PFA. Tisdale, 10 years a pro with Southampton and Bristol City, also scours the growing "not retained" lists of League clubs at the end of the season, and likely candidates are offered trials.

Since the end of last season, Team Bath have picked up around 15 new players from academies at clubs such as Aston Villa, Newcastle and Southampton. They are offered a two-year sports performance course with the opportunity to take a degree. "There would be no point in them coming here if they did not want to link in with the educational system we have," says Tisdale. "They are not only playing football, but going into the classroom, studying things like management, psychology and economics. What they are offered is a new beginning, but they must meet our academic criteria as well as being good players."

Team Bath field three teams every week, the senior one playing in the Screwfix Premiership, the West Country league. While it is about as far removed from the Premiership as the local playhouse is from the London Palladium, the game's the thing. And playing in the FA Cup, says Tisdale, "has really added a bit of spice and is a great boost for university football".

The fact that they have been accepted into the competition is personal triumph for Bath's progressive sports director, Ged Roddy, who was determined to give the sport a higher profile at what is now Britain's premier sports university. "In the last five years we have gone from the Bath and District league to the FA Cup, though there is still a long way to go before we reach the level I'd like.

"We've worked really hard to get into the FA Cup. We had to make sure the adminis-tration was right and our facilities met the criteria.

"The PFA have been fantastic, and equally I think they recognise that we are providing a service for youngsters who, if they were not here, would be out of the game. We are giving them a focus for their future."

Another unique aspect of the Bath story is that they have not only one of the youngest coaches in the British football (Tisdale is 29), but also the oldest. Ivor Powell, the former Welsh international who managed Port Vale and coached with Don Revie at Leeds, is 86. "He is indispensable," Tisdale says. "The players love him. He has so much energy and enthusiasm."

This is evident in training sessions, which are harder than at many League clubs, especially the gym work, which centres around boxercise, sparring and using kick-boxing techniques. "They need to be able to do all sorts of things with their bodies that will also help them on the football field in terms of agility and suppleness," says Powell. He also reckons it sharpens their minds, ready for those exams.

"To be playing in the company of such good young professionals in a high standard of football and now in the FA Cup in some ways is even better than being at Bristol City, when I was always in the reserves or in the youth team," says Ball, who is in the second year of his HND course and thinking of staying on to do his degree. "I want to come out of this with something because it can lead to a career in coaching or management."

For him, and his fellow university challengers, what looked like an early Bath has turned out to be a hearteningly warm one.