Everyone deserves a second chance. Therefore, each season The Football League gives young players not offered apprenticeships or professional contracts by clubs the opportunity to showcase their talents in front of representatives of other teams at the annual Exit and Assessment Trials.

"The Exit Trials aim to give schoolboy players the chance to impress and maybe gain an apprenticeship at another Football League or Premier League club," Youth Development Officer Phil Stant says. They are staged regionally in the February half-term holiday, after the boys have been informed about their futures, at venues such as Lilleshall and Bisham Abbey.

"On average 90 boys attend each trial which enables six teams, including substitutes, to be made up, with teams playing each other for half an hour per game," Stant says. "Everyone is given the appropriate amount of playing time so they have a fair chance to impress the 100 or so club representatives who attend.

"Over the years that the trials have been held they have proved to be very successful with an average 60 per cent of the players being offered at least a trial by another club."

For those not offered a professional contract after their apprenticeship, the Assessment Trials at 18 are "partly about closure", according to Alan Sykes, Chief Executive of League Football Education. "It's a final opportunity to prove to people that they are capable of playing. We recognise that if these lads are going to continue playing, for a high percentage it will be lower down the pyramid, outside The Football League."

One player that almost got away is Watford's Theo Robinson, who finished top scorer for Hereford United with 16 goals in all competitions during the Bulls' successful promotion campaign from Coca-Cola League 2 last season, before returning to his parent club, where he made his first senior-team start at the beginning of the 2008/09 campaign.

Robinson, though, could have been lost to the game at the age of 16 when he was released after a season as a schoolboy at Stoke City. Fortunately for Robinson - and indeed Hereford - he had been spotted by Watford at an Exit Trial held by The Football League at Derby County's Moor Farm training ground in 2005. Having impressed during a subsequent week's training at the club, he was signed on a two-year apprenticeship, which was followed by his first professional contract.

Robinson recognises how much he owes to the Exit Trial system. "I saw it as my last chance," he says. "I don't know what I'd have done. I had no fall-back plans; I just wanted to be a footballer. I'd probably have gone back home to Birmingham and tried to find a job, or gone to college."

Nick Cox, assistant manager at Watford's Academy, says: "Theo has bags of potential, as he showed with all those goals for Hereford, but we wouldn't have known about him but for the Exit Trials. I haven't got a crystal ball, so I don't know how far he will go, whether he'll, say, play for England or not. But he's come in and he's got the right attitude."

Watford make sure they are always represented at The Football League's annual Exit Trials. "We didn't know about Theo when we went to the Exit Trials," Cox says. "You tend to know about the boys in your immediate area, the south-east in our case, but not boys up in the north-west."

Robinson, who is now on the fringes of the first-team at Vicarage Road, adds: "I would advise people in the same situation I was in, to go to the Exit Trials and try their best. Anything can happen because there are loads of scouts there looking for players."