17 Oct 2022

Sport science protocols are essential in improving the efficiency and effectiveness of sport, says University of Botswana acting head of the department of sport science, Dr Lobone Kasale.

Speaking at an event to honour the senior women national football team in Gaborone recently, Kasale said ‘this is not to say that we have not been engaging sport science in our practices. For instance, a coach instructing footballers to warm up before engagement in activity is a sport science protocol with which to bring the body of the athletes to pre-activity levels’.

He said there was need to ensure that sport science protocols were implemented in totality.

Countries, he said, invested millions for sport science to improve the competitiveness of their teams.

He said sport science involved the application of scientific theories and practices to optimise the human performance.

“It involves many different areas and for our purpose today, we have grouped these into four general areas, sport and exercise psychology, exercise science and wellness, recreation and sport management and physical education and coaching,” Kasale said.

He said sport and exercise psychology was a field of sport science that dealt with the mental wellbeing of the athlete.

He said as competition could bring high levels of anxiety to athletes, the field dealt with mentally preparing athletes for competition and it also involved understanding how players could effectively work together to win competitions.

He said areas such as building the athletes’ mental capacity to deal with injury and other social stresses that they faced in their profession were covered in this area.

On exercise science and wellness, Kasale said it dealt with the entire process of understanding how scientific principles affected movement in sport and competition, so it included different areas such as anatomy and physiology, biochemistry or the chemical reactions that happen in the body during competition, biomechanics or the analysis of movement or how movement could be made effectively.

He also said sport was a multi-million industry and there was a need to ensure that it was managed well for it to achieve its purpose.

The area of sport management, he said, dealt with issues of sport funding and finance, sport law, sport marketing and sponsorship, facility management, sport governance, sport tourism and sport economics.

“This area deals with ensuring that the sports sector optimally performs its purpose so that it may make a meaningful contribution to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP),” he said.

On other issues, he said it was important to ensure that all the efforts to improve the performance of teams were based on research, adding research contextualised scientific protocols to environment.

Kasale said adopting ready-made practices that were developed in other countries, would not help Botswana teams.

“Rather we need to conduct research so that we develop context specific organisationally relevant solutions that will serve out teams,” he said. ENDS