Sports Science – The Future Of Sports Science

Published by Wayne Goldsmith on September 2, 2020September 2, 2020

There is no doubt that sports science has made a significant contribution to the development of sport around the world at every level.

However, as it is with every industry and in every walk of life, there’s a need for sports science to be committed to honest self-reflection, continuous self-improvement and effective change.

The reason behind this podcast, grew from three separate discussions I had last year with the CEOs of three different elite sports Institutes in three different nations.

Each of the CEOs talked to me about their organizational structure and said that their biggest problems and challenges related to the evolution of “silos”, i.e. departments and faculties within their Institute. These silos were acting independently and were more focused on their own financial growth and organizational influence than they were on working as part of the bigger team with other professionals and practitioners in other areas of the Institute.

For example, in each case, all three organizations had separate and distinct departments of:

• Sports Physiology;
• Sports Psychology;
• Sports Nutrition;
• Sports Analysis;
• Sports Biomechanics.

Each of the CEOs told me that they believed they had a “multi-disciplinary” environment, which they had copied from other elite sports institutes around the world because of these “departments” representing the various sports science disciplines.

It struck me that all three CEOs had made the same mistake: the same mistake other elite sports institutes have made – and continue to make around the world for the past 40 years.

Just having the various sports science disciplines represented does not mean you’ve created a “multi-disciplinary” environment.

It is only when the disciplines and practitioners work together collaboratively, in an athlete-focused, individualized, case-management, problem solving system that you can claim to have a true multi-disciplinary elite sports science system.

In this podcast, I will talk about sports science and how it has evolved since the early 1990s.

I will also present some ideas for how the University sector and the High performance sports industry can “future-proof” themselves as we head into the post Covid19 period.

Wayne Goldsmith