Bringing it all together: integrated approach benefits academics and athletics

Dr. Baudin acts as a conduit for researchers and coaches, facilitating opportunities in sport sciences.

Jane Hurly - 02 December 2011

Pierre Baudin's job is a bit like that of a traffic cop: wave 'em on here, merge 'em smoothly there - but Baudin is directing a flow of a different kind: he's responsible for broadly integrating coaching and sport science research in its many facets across the faculty and facilitating those opportunities with Golden Bears and Pandas Athletics so they're more formalized and readily accessible to coaches, researchers and students.

"As a faculty our intent is to more closely integrate our academic and athletics units," says Baudin, who took on the role of associate director, Coaching and Sport Science, earlier in the year. It's a move that's another step further in the articulation of the "Alberta Model" developed this year by dean Kerry Mummery, and which seeks to weave the high performance athletics program into the academic curriculum.

"In a nutshell," says Baudin, "I'm responsible for developing policy and programs relating to teaching and research in the areas of coaching and sport science."

Baudin says at present there are many informal instances where researchers work with teams or assist coaches or coaches ask for the assistance of researchers and they work together for a time, but it's important to formalize these opportunities so there's equal access to them across all teams and for any researcher interested in working with one of the teams.

"That means if a coach wants the help of a researcher to do physical testing but doesn't know who to go to, I would be the liaison between the coach and researcher," says Baudin. "I act as the conduit, the mediator, in matching requests for coaching or sport science expertise. My job is to open doors and facilitate people working together."

Secondly, says Baudin, "We want to tie our academic curriculum in sport science to our athletic program. So, for example, in the BARST degree there's a specialization in sport management. There are few places students would gain the experience they could managing a major athletic department than here, working with arguably the best athletic program in Canada. So we may develop an introductory sport management course for this degree."

In terms of graduate student education, Baudin says students in the master's degree in coaching already have both an academic mentor and a coach mentor as they progress their studies. "We're doing very well in terms of integrating coaching studies and athletics, but," says Baudin, "we believe that internationalizing our students' experience is essential and we're looking at creating more for-credit opportunities with our partners in Norway and other Scandinavian schools and elsewhere in the world. Students will benefit immensely from being able to spend a term in another country and be immersed in a different system and culture and we're working hard toward making this happen."

Curriculum delivery is also woven into Baudin's role and he sees opportunities to increase the involvement of current staff with advanced degrees who aren't currently teaching, in the classroom. "We do have many people in the faculty who are academically qualified to teach university courses, so we would like to include them as instructors. Our plan is to use the staff we currently have to teach courses as this brings more stability than with sessional instructors. There's the added advantage that these staff members are in the trenches, as it were, and who better to learn from than someone who has a wealth of experience already and does what they teach?"

Baudin says this will mean streamlining what some current staff are doing to enable them to teach. "We will have to examine the efficiencies in the system. Maybe a lot of things we're doing aren't necessary or helping us toward our mandate. We will be re-examining what people do and how they do it and it may mean a restructuring of some job descriptions," he says.

Ultimately, says Baudin, the implementation of the Alberta Model, will mean one thing: better educated students. "We think this will lead to great engagement when we're all contributing to curriculum with the common goal of educating sport science and coaching students in a closely integrated system that brings it all together."