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Technical Direction

The focus of the Technical Direction group is primarily related to the AIS review finding that it should continue to provide leadership for Australia’s high-performance sport. This is provided through the coordination of the national programs for the delivery of services in the areas of athlete and career education, elite sports research, talent search and laboratory standards assistance.

• National Sport Science Quality Assurance program - The National Elite Sports Council supported national sporting organisations only using accredited laboratories for the testing of athletes within national programs (effective from 1 January 2003). A national physiology workshop was held, which agreed to include the discipline of Strength and Conditioning within the overall scheme framework.

• National Talent Search - During 2001-02, a review was undertaken re-affirming the national commitment to, and support for, the program. The state institute of sport/state academy of sport partners assessed 35,000 students, placing 250 athletes into 18 sports-specific programs. Research and development was ongoing in the area of the mature-age talent transfer model, and the program expanded to six regional academies of sport in New South Wales.

• National Elite Sports Research Program - Supported by the Program, research at the AIS has changed from a rapid-response inhouse approach to a more strategic and collaborative approach with the various state institutes and academies of sport. The newly established Strategic Research Committee will ensure that research conducted at the AIS, and/or on behalf of the AIS, is not only of benefit to the preparation of Australia’s elite athletes, but is also of the highest scientific calibre.

• National Athlete Career and Education - This program provided advice and support to 25 national sporting organisations on the integration of athlete career and education into their high-performance plans. The links with international partners were strengthened through revised agreements and the implementation of a new quality-assurance framework for the delivery of the National Athlete Career and Education program.

• Benchmarking - This new initiative of the AIS to ensure world best practice involves benchmarking AIS sports psychology. The deliberations of the benchmarking process are expected to be made available to state institutes and academies of sport, and to national sporting organisations for their information, with two AIS activities to be benchmarked each year.

• Seminars and workshops - Seminars and workshops were held on difficult and contentious areas, including risk management for the clinician in sports medicine practice.

• AIS and Cooperative Research Centres for MicroTechnology - To keep Australian sports science at the world leading-edge, the AIS collaborated with the Cooperative Research Centres for MicroTechnology based in Melbourne and Brisbane. This collaboration aims to develop unique monitoring equipment that is essentially unobtrusive and can be used in training or in competition. This will be achieved by drawing on the knowledge and core competencies from the Cooperative Research Centres’ other projects that aim to develop a toolbox of micro and nano-scale techniques. Simultaneously, expertise from the AIS will focus on the acquisition and interpretation of data, and its meaningful presentation to both coaches and athletes. The project started in July 2001 and already prototype equipment for four sporting disciplines has been trialed, using micro-electromechanical devices with generic telemetry capability underpinning all of these. The Cooperative Research Centres have been a catalyst to an unprecedented level of multi-centre cooperation in Australian sports science.

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