Centers of excellance

[trueblue1234]

But your looking at the individual improvement in comparison to a golfer. When in reality you are talking about all 20 players on a team improving by 1 or two % as they will all be getting use out of the room. So I don't believe the benefits are diluted as you say, infact quite the opposite as there will be multiple beneficiaries in a team using these facilities.

[Hardy]

Your absolutely right, we can all post whatever we want on whatever topic we want but would you not agree that we should temper our comments on topics we have limited knowledge on? Would you not regard a poster as a bit of an idiot if he came on here and said the following?;

1. I know nothing about football but that Dublin crowd are useless.

2. I've never even held a guitar but that Hendrix lad was pure shite.

3. I was in San Fran last year and that Golden Gate bridge is some piece of rubbish, I don't know what's keeping it up. I'm no engineer but the lad who designed that doesn't know his arse from his elbow.


I presume you'd agree the above comments are untrue and anyone saying them would not know much about football, guitar playing and engineering? Well you came out with the same kind of nonsense. You dismissed the science of human performance as.....

a self serving self promoting industry following what every other profession does by taking simple common sense ideas and building a mystique and language around them to make people believe it is more complicated than it actually is

......that is patently nonsense and to come out with such a dismissive comment you should have a strong argument to support it and not just a "it's a free country so I can say whatever mad bollocks I like" defence.

You followed this with the daftest supporting argument I've ever heard.....

Its amazing how all the great teams and players down the years could function without centres of excellence.

If that's a reasonable argument you could argue that society functioned just fine when we all wore buffalo skins, lived in caves and hunted wild animals for our food. Humans functioned but few would argue that we haven't made some improvements. Centres of excellence are a great idea if they can be funded and built in the correct location.

Well at least that's a response that opens up a discussion rather than shutting it down.

Regarding professions. As a fully qualified card carrying member of one and having gone through years of education and training equal to somewhere between a degree and a masters, I am convinced that what professional bodies do is as I stated. Take core principles, based in common sense approaches and build a language and theoretical framework around them so as to preclude the uninitiated and make the basic ideas more complicated than they are. I am not qualified in Sports Science but I do not expect their profession to be any different. To back that up I can rely on my own experience with excellent coaches long before anyone had considered sports science.

As for the original argument which was I think about centres of excellence being a waste of money, I would argue this. One of my own professional pre occupations is with cost benefit analysis. For an individual sportsman I have no problem in accepting that the cost and effort expended on forensic analysis of movement and working on changing or improving that movement has a direct relationship to the output of that sportsman. A golfer is probably a prime example where maybe a 1% improvement in distance, for example, might have a direct result in lower scores over a tournament. So in that case minute improvements can be justified. And maybe I'm wrong in this, but at the top level in any sport you are only talking about minute differences. For a team sport and especially an amateur team sport, I think the cost benefit relationship is completely different. If we start talking about small differences at an individual level, the impact of those differences are diluted by the fact that it is a team sport and so performance depends on the interaction of 20 individuals. There is further dilution by the fact that there are 20 opposing individuals who ave a direct impact on the teams performance. The officals in football are another active participant that impact the performance achieved. So it makes sense that the link between individual improvements and team output are much more diluted than they are in individual sports. 
So if the benefits are diluted, is the cost warranted for an amateur sports team ? To go back to my own vintage, would sports science make Matt Connor a better footballer, I don't think so. Would sports science have made a Matt Connor out of a John Guinan, I don't think so.
So what does it do. Maybe if guys believe it gives them an edge, then it does, but does that justify the cost?

I've lost track a bit on where I'm going now, and havent any more time to spend on it so Im gonna click post.

Or, as GBS said, all professions are conspiracies against the laity.

[Zulu]

Your absolutely right, we can all post whatever we want on whatever topic we want but would you not agree that we should temper our comments on topics we have limited knowledge on? Would you not regard a poster as a bit of an idiot if he came on here and said the following?;

1. I know nothing about football but that Dublin crowd are useless.

2. I've never even held a guitar but that Hendrix lad was pure shite.

3. I was in San Fran last year and that Golden Gate bridge is some piece of rubbish, I don't know what's keeping it up. I'm no engineer but the lad who designed that doesn't know his arse from his elbow.


I presume you'd agree the above comments are untrue and anyone saying them would not know much about football, guitar playing and engineering? Well you came out with the same kind of nonsense. You dismissed the science of human performance as.....

a self serving self promoting industry following what every other profession does by taking simple common sense ideas and building a mystique and language around them to make people believe it is more complicated than it actually is

......that is patently nonsense and to come out with such a dismissive comment you should have a strong argument to support it and not just a "it's a free country so I can say whatever mad bollocks I like" defence.

You followed this with the daftest supporting argument I've ever heard.....

Its amazing how all the great teams and players down the years could function without centres of excellence.

If that's a reasonable argument you could argue that society functioned just fine when we all wore buffalo skins, lived in caves and hunted wild animals for our food. Humans functioned but few would argue that we haven't made some improvements. Centres of excellence are a great idea if they can be funded and built in the correct location.

Well at least that's a response that opens up a discussion rather than shutting it down.

Regarding professions. As a fully qualified card carrying member of one and having gone through years of education and training equal to somewhere between a degree and a masters, I am convinced that what professional bodies do is as I stated. Take core principles, based in common sense approaches and build a language and theoretical framework around them so as to preclude the uninitiated and make the basic ideas more complicated than they are. I am not qualified in Sports Science but I do not expect their profession to be any different. To back that up I can rely on my own experience with excellent coaches long before anyone had considered sports science.

As for the original argument which was I think about centres of excellence being a waste of money, I would argue this. One of my own professional pre occupations is with cost benefit analysis. For an individual sportsman I have no problem in accepting that the cost and effort expended on forensic analysis of movement and working on changing or improving that movement has a direct relationship to the output of that sportsman. A golfer is probably a prime example where maybe a 1% improvement in distance, for example, might have a direct result in lower scores over a tournament. So in that case minute improvements can be justified. And maybe I'm wrong in this, but at the top level in any sport you are only talking about minute differences. For a team sport and especially an amateur team sport, I think the cost benefit relationship is completely different. If we start talking about small differences at an individual level, the impact of those differences are diluted by the fact that it is a team sport and so performance depends on the interaction of 20 individuals. There is further dilution by the fact that there are 20 opposing individuals who ave a direct impact on the teams performance. The officals in football are another active participant that impact the performance achieved. So it makes sense that the link between individual improvements and team output are much more diluted than they are in individual sports. 
So if the benefits are diluted, is the cost warranted for an amateur sports team ? To go back to my own vintage, would sports science make Matt Connor a better footballer, I don't think so. Would sports science have made a Matt Connor out of a John Guinan, I don't think so.
So what does it do. Maybe if guys believe it gives them an edge, then it does, but does that justify the cost?

I've lost track a bit on where I'm going now, and havent any more time to spend on it so Im gonna click post.

That's much better fearglasmor, all professions have a bit of BS and bluster about them but sports science helps direct training in a focused and educated way. It isn't perfect and is continually evolving but it is certainly helping to take the guess work out of physical development.

As regards centres of excellence, it should be remembered that these aren't for the sole preserve of senior teams but allow county boards have a permanent base for all county sand development squads. That they have a gym and some fitness rooms is hardly a sign of a sport losing the run of itself.

On Matt Connor, sport science won't produce a Matt Connor but it has never claimed it can. Modern training is about making the next Matt Connor a little bit stronger, a little bit faster, a little bit more mentally strong and a bit more focused and the parts of his game he could get better at. It's about improvements based on scientific knowledge, it isn't perfect but it is better than what went before even if many talented coaches might have intuitively known some of it already.