Carlisle United are delighted to announce that Gavin Skelton has signed a new deal which will keep him at Brunton Park as assistant head coach until the summer of 2021.
Skelton, 38, stepped up as assistant to Steven Pressley at the beginning of this season and took over as caretaker for the recent games against Port Vale and Cambridge.
Head coach Chris Beech said: “It’s fantastic for me to have Gavin’s situation confirmed. I spoke a lot with David [Holdsworth] after the interview process had been completed and much of that was about planning for the future.
“Gavin is fully included in that and that’s because I feel it’s vital for us, as a club, to have his input into first team affairs. The thing I’ve found with him already is that he’s just a really good person.
“He’s humble, he says his piece within that, he speaks with honesty, he’s committed to the club and he’s the type of person who will raise a potential problem at the same time as offering a way to solve it. When you have people like that around you’d be daft not to utilise them.
“In terms of football, it’s a business where this happens quite a lot. With Keith Hill we were very successful as a pair, but we didn’t know anything about each other when we first started off. If anything, we were pitted against each other with our youth teams until we both got to Rochdale together.
“Our relationship grew out of nothing and, with the way we’ve already started to bounce off each other, I think that will be the same for us here.”
The former-Workington and Queen of the South manager came back to Brunton Park in 2017 as the Professional Development Phase Coach with the academy.
He joined the club’s centre of excellence as an eight-year-old and played both sides of the border with over 200 appearances for Gretna in a seven-year stay one of the highlights of his career.