"I've been on tele before, but I was wearing a balaclava at the time."
A fictional appearance on Crimewatch aside, Jon Grey isn't particularly used to being in front of the cameras.
"I've a face for radio rather than tele too," he adds.
But behind the self-deprecation and the jokes is arguably one of Swansea City's most influential coaching philosophers. After sadly seeing his own hopes of forging a playing career evaporate, Grey has worked his way up the ranks of his club's famed academy, one of Welsh football's most prosperous talent factories.
Fans are now set to get a chance to grab a first-hand glimpse of life inside Landore as part of a new TV documentary. Bois yr Academi will follow several youngsters as they bid to make their footballing dreams come true. Having been named as the head of the academy last summer, Grey is very much at the centre of their journey.
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"I'm really enjoying it," he tells WalesOnline when asked about his current role. "It's been something new for me, having been a coach for a number of years. It's been an opportunity to look at new skills and develop different parts of leadership.
"I've always been a coach rather than someone who's managed a department or the academy as a whole. I've found it quite difficult to adjust. It's a different challenge every day when you're leading the academy because there's so many to it."
Grey's history with the Swans goes back a long way. As a youngster in the 1990s he was himself a scholar, and even turned professional before being forced to effectively retire due to a back injury.
"You're making me sound so old!" he blurts out when the conversation drifts to those formative coaching years, which began with a coaching role with the under-18s 10 years ago.
He's clearly seen plenty of changes and challenges along the way - particularly over the last couple of years.
"Covid was massive," he adds. "We worked tirelessly here to do stuff with players to try to engage them, keep them active and help them continue to develop. They obviously weren't allowed to come in and we were quite inventive in using Zoom, which was massive as that meant they were able to do activities in their back garden. It was a tough time for us.
"There were some players who perhaps suffered more than others on the back of it. But Steve Cooper was a big believer in youth and he brought a number of players back to train with the first team.
"For us as a club, it was clearly a tough time, but our engagement kept them going."
The financial impact of Covid then saw the academy lose its Category One status, prompting concerns over the club's ability to keep producing top talent. But Grey insists Landore is still the perfect place to bring through the next generation of talent.
"Yes Category One was great, but we're just trying to provide excellence and try to make every player who comes through our door as elite as we possibly can," he said.
"That would be the same if we were Category One or Category Four. Financially, I think all clubs took a hit during that period of Covid and when they came back to play behind closed doors. It's testament to all clubs that they're still getting players through even through hard financial times.
"In fact, we probably need our academy more than ever. Instead of going out and spending any kind of fee on a player, clubs are having to look to their academies more. So it's really important for us as a club that we continue producing players for the manager."
Grey is always keen to adapt. Keen to evolve the methods he hopes will help to bring out the very best of the talent pool here. In fact, it's just as much about developing coaches as it is about developing players.
"The ultimate dream for us is to have as many locally-based players playing in our first team as possible," he said.
"But the utopia would be to maybe get a manager who has come through our system as well. We work hard not just with the development of our players but our staff too. We've had a number of members of staff who have worked in the academy and are now working in the Premier League in various roles."
All of this is underpinned by a consistent set of core principles, with the resulting breadcrumbs leading all the way up to the first team.
"To try to make the transition .right they way through the system, you want to try and make that as seamless as possible," he added. "So you want to try to adopt the same playing style. Even if the playing style of the first team was slightly different we'd still try to adopt that playing style in the academy, because it's been really successful for us.
"Fundamentally, we look to set the principles that can fit into any system, formation a manager wants to use."
Russell Martin himself is clearly an important part of the process, and the Swans boss is constantly kept in the loop courtesy of conversations that go right to the heart of what they believe it means to play football the right way.
"The gaffer's fantastic," he said. "He's got a huge interest in the academy. Him and Kris O'Leary speak every day about the under-23 players. They have a great relationship and the gaffer comes down.
"He'll come to watch training sessions. He comes to watch games as much as he possibly can.
"The gaffer sits down with us at the beginning of the season and we lay out our curriculum, which is very similar with how he sees the game being played. At Swansea we've been lucky over the years that every manager we've employed wants to play the same way. That's fantastic for us because our kids now are used to that, and we've got to set the standard."
Grey was largely responsible for establishing that curriculum, a set of guidelines aimed at teaching young players the key principles of the game. The ultimate aim is to give them all the tools needed to thrive in the high-octane environment created by Martin and his first-team staff.
He'd probably never admit it himself, but it's difficult not to feel the beliefs outlined to Swansea's youngsters are very much the seed that hopefully will grow into what many would consider as 'the Swansea way'.
"Everyone knows Swansea have a particular way of playing," he added. "We always try to play it out from the back, playing attractive attacking football, moving the ball through the thirds. Not going from back to front as quick as we can and we have to find all the different ways of doing that, which we've got lots of.
"We understand the fans at Swansea want an exciting brand of football. So we have to teach the kids right from under-9s all the way up to be able to do that."
Fine tuning it all is clearly a big part of the job, but it's one Grey still relishes as much as ever.
He freely admits the inspiration provided by alumni like Joe Allen, Ben Davies, Connor Roberts and Joe Rodon is enough in itself to provide motivation for him and his staff, but there is perhaps some pressure to keep the conveyor belt of talent whirring.
So, with that in mind, it's difficult not to wonder who might be the next cab off the rank. Grey himself is a little reluctant to single out individuals, although he does have a couple of ideas.
"I've been back in training, and I'm thinking of making a comeback," he jokes. "So I would say Jon Grey, although my best position was sub!
"But seriously we have a very good nucleus of players in every age group. Where we are geographically we've got a pool of players we can pick from, which isn't a huge number, so we've got a number of players that we feel have got a really good chance of progressing.
"There are a number of players involved with the first team last year. We've had Azeem Abdulai on the bench, Lincoln McFayden, Dan Williams, Cameron Congreve, they've all done really well.
"We've had Joel Cotterill involved in the last couple of games of the season. But looking down the age groups, we're confident we can continue to give the gaffer, and hopefully it's Russell Martin in the Premier League, at least a couple of players every year.
"The one thing that we don't do is put pressure on ourselves, or put numbers on how many players we want to produce every year. We know we have a very good nucleus of players here that we think have a very good chance of going on to become professionals, having a professional career.
"But it's a long-term project in an academy. In 10 years' time, whoever the manager may be, we hope to still be producing players that can go in there and perform."
Bois yr Academi will be broadcast on S4C on Tuesday at 9pm
