Mark De Ste Croix on injury management and robustness training for young female athletes

The Women in Sport & Exercise Academic Network Podcast

In this podcast, I chat with Professor Mark De Ste Croix about: injury management and robustness training for young females who take part in sport; his latest ventures and research, such as the risk project, which is a grass-root coach education programme aiming to support the health and well-being of young people; and his advice on being successful in gaining research grants. Mark is an invited speaker at our WISEAN conference on 11th/12th June 2019, 'Pushing the Boundaries', being held at St Mary's University, Twickenham, London...Mark gives us a flavour of what he will be talking about!

Prof Mark De ste Croix is Professor of Paediatric sport and exercise at the University of Gloucestershire. Having trained as a PE teacher Mark has always been interested in the health and well-being of children and in the development of talent. More recently Mark’s interests have been geared specifically around injury prevention in youth sport and coach education. Mark has a specific interest in the female athlete and is the research lead for the University-based FA Women’s High Performance Football Centre (HPCs). He has set up a national group looking at research within women’s football and this involves leading academics from a number of HPCs and individuals working in women’s football within Europe. He has previously completed research projects looking at fatigue and injury risk in female youth footballers for both FIFA and UEFA and secured research funding from the FA looking at robustness training for female players. More recently Mark led and completed a large European-funded project, exploring the development of grass-root football coaches’ youth movement competency skills, which are now being developed with UK Coaching. Mark also helped to develop and deliver the FA level 3 Talent Identification course. He has worked with a wide range of sports and national organisations including the English Cricket Board, British gymnastics, netball, rugby, Barcelona Football Club and currently with Athletic Club Bilbao in Spain. In his spare time, Mark plays football, golf and badminton and loves spending time with his family, usually on a roller coaster somewhere.