Written by Jesse Maugeri, UTS Bachelor of Sport and Exercise Management student
My Professional Placement Organisation: Women’s NPL 1 NSW Football Team
With my placement start time being 5:45pm I am able to sleep in during the morning (and who does not love that). In the mornings I try to work on any assignments that are due or type out any lectures that I have coming up so that I can take down any extra additional notes. Before I head off to my placement during the morning, I make sure that all the GPS units needed for the training session are charged and ready to go. Around 2:00pm I get sent the structure of the training session that is going to be completed for the night which I take note of the drills, duration and start and times which is going to help me later on once training is completed. Upon arriving at my placement, as I conduct a strength session one-on-one with a player returning from a major injury I set up the equipment that is needed to complete the session so when they arrive it is all ready to go. As they perform these exercises, I coach them about the correct technique and provide them cues to execute the movement in a safe manner, it usually takes around 45 minutes for them to complete the session.
With the players and coaches expected to be on-field for start at 7:00pm it is my role and responsibility to set up the prehab portion of the training session and ensure this is ready for the athletes when they arrive on field so I usually try and get this set up by 6:55pm. With the players starting to make their way onto the training field it is my role to hand out their GPS units, each unit is labelled with a number corresponding to a certain player. This information is useful as it allows for measures of the players external load of each training session. Prehab component of the training session is run by me and usually takes 15 minutes to complete, each of the three training sessions of the week consist of different movements so I ensure that I read over and know these movements before leading the squad of roughly 36 players.
Once Prehab is completed I then take a player (the same athlete returning from their major injury) through an individualised aerobic and technical session each training night as they slowly progress in their return to training with the squad again, this usually takes anywhere between 1 hour – 1 hour and twenty minutes depending on the focus of the session.
Once the training session is completed, I collect back all the GPS units and also collect each individual player’s rating of perceived exertion (RPE) which provides a measure of the players internal load of the session that they have just undertaken.
Once I arrive home (usually around 9:15pm) my role for the day is not quite over yet, I quickly grab something to eat for dinner and then it is straight onto the computer to upload the data from that session. To upload the data, I plug the GPS units into their charging pods and use this sync application to upload the data from the GPS units onto the computer. Once the syncing process is completed I log onto GPS’s companies website using my teams log in details to access the data from the training session, here my role is to split the data according to the drills performed at that training session. Once this is complete, I then transfer this information into our teams spreadsheet. This allows for the coaches and player welfare staff to view the information from each session and see if any players are at an increased risk of injury due to them being underloaded or overloaded. This usually sees me finish around 10:30-11:00pm each night.
I do this similar routine for each of the three training sessions and for the game at the end of the week in which I attend. At the end of each week with all the data compiled I then send of an weekly team analysis to the coaching staff and the player welfare team to assess if the loads experienced during training were similar to those experienced in the game to help design the upcoming weeks training.
Inside | Out 