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Sport Science
 
Photo by Supplied

Science of Sport

Jessica Munro —

On the 25th of August Jacob Duffy, Pippa Chang, Dr (Murray) Thompson and myself attended a Science of Sport lunch held at the glenroy auditorium as representatives of Logan Park High school at the Sports science talk held by the NZ National Science Festival. 

This event consisted of a general presentation hosted by a representative of the NZNSF, and 2 main talks with 3 visitors.

One talk was presented by two sports analysts for New Zealand netball teams, Joana Horan and Fiona Watson. It was inspiring to have these two women come up and tell us about their journey and experiences within the sporting industry as scientists and women. They talked to us about what their job as sports analysts consists of, it was really interesting to see the level of skill needed to count how many passes that occurred during a professional netball game, this is only one task amongst many which they would be doing until early hours in the morning.

The next talk was held by Nic Gill, the all blacks head conditioning coach. He talked to us less about his journey and experiences but more about what being a conditioning coach in New Zealand and the impact which he believes he has left on the professional rugby community. He was one of the first conditioning coaches in New Zealand, basically creating the job to suit his interests and abilities, it has now become a very high demand job within professional sporting teams. He has very clear values about fitness, and to describe it in a sentence it was; eat well, play well, live well.

Both of these talks were rich in information for those who are interested in a sports science avenue, and were very inspiring to us as highly active students within logan park PE, science and sports.

The food was pretty good too.