Have you enjoyed the University of Canberra (UC) PLAY ON exhibition?
If you haven’t been yet the exhibition is still open but will close 31 August 2023. You can attend for free casually between 8am-7pm, Monday to Friday, or book a free guided tour here.
We thank everyone from Capital Football and our women’s football community who have kindly donated their time, stories, and memorabilia to make the PLAY ON exhibition such a success. We are proud of our students from the Faculty of Arts and Design, and thank our fearless leaders Mikaela, Stephanie, and Ashley who created and brought the history of women’s football in the Canberra region to life.
As we continue to ride the highs of the PLAY ON exhibition, the UC Sport Strategy team will be hosting a Research Event titled: Women’s Football: the future & what’s next? on Friday 18 August 2023 from 5:30pm (don’t worry there are no FIFA WWC games on this night 😊).
The research event will be a fun and interactive online format where our speakers only have 5mins to pitch their research, just enough time to entice you to want to know more! That’s right, you don’t have to brave the winter temperatures you can watch from the comfort of your home.
Speakers for this event will be:
- Dr Catherine Ordway – Sport Integrity Research Lead & Associate Professor (Sports Management), Faculty of Health, UC.
Title: How do we keep women’s football clean? Start paying players a fair wage.
Key Points:
- Increasing resources for women’s football players, particularly around union representation and collective bargaining agreements.
- Focus on the wellbeing and ethics of care and less around describing athletes as “assets”.
- Pay parity and well-being measures will improve infield performance AND lower integrity risks such as match fixing.
- Dr Jocelyn Mara – Assistant Professor in Sports Analytics, Faculty of Health, UC.
Title: Using pattern recognition to discover playing strategies in women’s football
Key Points:
- In high-performance women’s football, team playing strategies have traditionally been developed by coaching staff using a mostly qualitative approach, often informed by video analysis of matches and the coach’s own experience and perceptions about which strategies lead to goal scoring opportunities.
- This research aims to support coaching practice by objectively detecting playing strategies using spatio-temporal data and pattern recognition techniques.
- Josh Waugh – Head Sports Analyst, Canberra United & Women in Sport 50:50 Industry Partner PhD Scholarship student, Faculty of Health, UC.
Title: Athlete Monitoring in Female Footballers
Key Points:
- My research will investigate athlete monitoring practices in elite female footballers and aims to develop a female-specific monitoring tool to reduce the risk of burnout and injuries throughout the career.
- The female-specific monitoring tool emerges as a potential game-changer in female sports, with broader applications in performance optimisation and injury prevention, adaptable to other sports by tweaking specific metrics.
- Professor Richard Keegan – Performance and Exercise Psychology & UC High Performance Sports Fellow, Faculty of Health, UC.
Title: Reflections on the provision of university sponsored sport science support to elite women’s sports teams.
Key Points:
- Women’s sport is undergoing substantial gains in recognition, viewership, interest, and sponsorship, while funding and resources continue to catch up. Universities stand to gain by supporting their local women’s teams, if-and-where sport science support may be difficult for teams to secure.
- What are the specific considerations university staff must navigate when delivering sport science support to elite women’s teams?
- Dr Tracey Dickson – Associate Professor & Program Director, Event and Tourism Management (Canberra Business School), Faculty of Business, Government and Law, UC.
Title: Impacts and legacies from large sporting events: lessons from research on 6 events across 5 countries.
Key Points:
- Impacts: Large sporting events require thousands of volunteers who are typically drawn from existing volunteer populations.
- Legacies: To achieve legacies requires planning and resourcing, before, during and after the event.
- Mikaela Danvers (Senior Lecturer in Design, Faculty of Arts and Design, UC), Stephanie Trimble (Lecturer in Interior Architecture, Faculty of Arts and Design, UC), and Ashley Harrison (Lecturer – Cultural Heritage, Faculty of Arts and Design, UC)
Title: PLAY ON exhibition: the research process
We encourage you to register for this event by heading to: https://events.humanitix.com/uc-sport-strategy-and-play-on-exhibition-research-event
Questions can be directed to the UC Sport Strategy team on UCSportStrategy@canberra.edu.au.