Mark Yates

Mark Yates joined the Harriers on a free transfer from Doncaster Rovers in July 1994.

His career began at Birmingham City where he played in the winning side at Wembley in the 1991 Leyland DAF Trophy. He then joined Burnley for £40,000 and then moved on to Doncaster.

After being our captain for a number of seasons “Yatesy” joined Cheltenham Town in January 1999, the year that Cheltenham left the Conference for the promised land for a fee of £25,000.

After five years at Whaddon Rd Yates found himself out of favour there after a new manager, John Ward, took over. Jan Molby, in an act of charity, bought Yates back home to join his ever growing band of ‘Old Comrades’ at Aggborough. In the end it wasn’t charity but a bit of shrewd thinking by the Great Dane. Yates was one of the reasons we escaped relegation from the Football League by using his experience to coax the best out of the rest of the team.

It still didn’t mean he would be staying for another season at Aggborough because he was released at the end of the season after earning the gratitude and plaudits from all Harriers fans.

He then took up the job of first team coach at Burnley and re-joined up with his ex Cheltenham manager, Steve Cotterill until re-joining the Harriers again in January 2006 but this time as the manager. In his first season in charge he managed to save us from the possibility of a successive relegation and in his second, full, season we reached the final of the FA Trophy against Stevenage at the new Wembley Stadium.

Sadly we lost that game 3-2 after leading through two fine James Constable goals at half time. The following season Yates took us to the brink of the play-offs and managed to build a great side that looked good enough to go for promotion again the following season but that side was ripped apart from under him by a board that were not interested in promotion and just wanted to cut costs to the bone.

He left the Harriers just before Christmas 2009 when he and Neil Howarth joined Cheltenham Town as their new manager/coach.

Since then he has managed Crawley Town and also returned to Aggborough in 2017 once more as the U23 manager but that didn’t last long and he left after a couple of weeks.

In January 2019 he once again returned to Aggborough to take on the managerial role once more but after failing to get us into the play-offs he was told that his services were no longer wanted.