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SECTION 4
Lecturer:
Good morning and welcome to the University’s Open Day and to our mini-lecture
from the Sports Studies department. Now the purpose of this lecture is twofold:
one — we want you to experience a university lecture, to give you a taste of what
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listening to a university lecture is like, and two — we want you to find out
something about the Sports Studies program at this university. So feel free to ask
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any questions during the talk and I’ll do my best to answer them.
Right — so what does a course in Sports Studies involve? Well, you wouldn’t be
blamed for not knowing the answer to this question because Sports Studies as a
discipline is still comparatively new. But it’s a growing area and one which is now
firmly established at our university.
Now there are three distinct strands to Sports Studies and you would need to
choose fairly early on just which direction you wanted to follow. And I’ll just run
over these now. Firstly, we’ve got the Sports Psychology strand, secondly, we’ve
got the Sports Management strand, and last, but not least, there’s the Sports
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Physiology strand. So Just to recap there’s Sports Psychology, Sports Management,
and Sports Physiology.
Let’s look first at Psychology. Now the people who study Sports Psych want to
work with top athletes, and they’re looking at what will take those athletes that
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one percent extra. What makes them win? When all other things are equal,
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physically all other things are equal, they want to know … what are the mental
factors involved? The Sports Psychologist works closely with the athlete through
his or her training program and becomes an integral part of the team. In fact you
could say that they play just as important a role as the coach. So if you’re
interested in what makes people win this could be the area for you.
Now secondly, we’ve got the strand which I referred to as Sports Management
and this goes hand in hand with the area of Sports Marketing. So you might like
to think of this area as having two branches: Management and Marketing. On the
Management side we look at issues relating to the running of sports clubs,
management of athletes that sort of thing. But then on the other side, we’ve got
Sports Marketing. And this is the side that interests me more because here we will
look at the market forces behind sport. Questions like: why do people spend their
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money on a football match, or a tennis game rather, than say on buying a CD or
going to the cinema? What are those market forces?
Sport used to just compete with sport. Nowadays it competes with other leisure
activities. The spectators go to sport to be entertained rather than out of loyalty to
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a team. They want to have an evening out and they don’t want the cheap seats any
more they want good seats they want entertainment. And the professional
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sportsmen and women respond to this without question. They’re there to give a
performance. They provide the entertainment. So in the marketing course we
address all these commercial issues and we look at how this hooks back into the
Management of sport.
Now the third branch of Sports Studies sometimes comes under another name
and is also known as Exercise Science. And again here we find that there are two
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distinct types of exercise science. The first is working very much at the macro level.
What I call the huffing and puffing people. So this looks at fitness testing, body

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measurements, all that sort of thing. But the more interesting side of sports
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physiology, at least in my view, is the side that looks at the micro level, looking at
cellular change. They’re doing cellular research, looking at changes in body cells
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when the body is under stress.
So that just about brings us to the end of our mini-lecture for today. I hope
you’ve found it interesting and I look forward to seeing you all on our course next
year. Feel free to come and talk to me if you want any more information. I’ll be
over at that notice board near the main entrance.

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