The University of Toronto’s faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education will be giving students and faculty the opportunity to work in support of high performance athletes.
The faculty signed a five-year agreement with the Canadian Sport Centre Ontario (CSCO) June 27.
Jason Vescovi, lead of the CSCO’s applied sport science research program, called the partnership a “win-win situation all around” for both the students and the athletes involved.
“The students are involved in an environment where they’re able to work hand-in-hand with our high performance athletes and gain experience into what’s involved with doing applied sports science research,” he explained.
“The coaches and the athletes benefit because we’re able to develop and generate knowledge for specific questions that are of interest to our targeted sports.”
Vescovi said U of T was a perfect fit for the partnership for a wide variety of reasons, since both the CSCO and U of T will be heavily involved in the 2015 Pan-American Games, to be hosted by the City of Toronto.
He also pointed to the opportunity created as a result of the highly regarded reputations of both the CSCO’s sports scientists and the the faculty’s staff.
“We have here some of the top sports scientists in the country, and specifically, the [faculty] is very well known and respected for their faculty, the research and resources that they have available,” Vescovi said.
“To combine them and be able to approach projects in a very coordinated fashion, it just really highlights the importance that both of these organizations are putting towards applied sports science.”
One aspect of the partnership is the sport science assistant program, already in its second year, in which the CSCO employs the faculty students as summer science assistants to work alongside leading scientists and researchers in a lab setting.
A current ongoing project involves students working from data collection, data analysis and interpretation perspectives to determine performance differences between various level figure skaters.
Being involved in an increasing number of projects like these will greatly benefit U of T students at both the undergraduate and graduate level, said faculty dean Ira Jacobs.
“The students involved will gain the experience of actually being able to work in support of high performance athletes as part of their learning here,” he said. “They can actually get a chance to see how some of the theory that they’ve learned about can be applied.”
The partnership will also benefit faculty members who take an interest in sports and high performance athletes within their research.
Professors will have the chance to use the CSCO as a platform to test their research ideas and further help athletes in the future, Jacobs said, noting that he hopes to see more programs like this one established in the years to come.
“Our society obviously values sports tremendously. Our taxpayer’s dollars are supporting the hosting of the Pan-American games,” he said. “Similarly, we’re preparing to send the athletes to the Olympic games. Yet, there’s very little support, in our country and in our province, for research into sports.”
