A few weeks ago, I was involved in a seminar at West Bromich Albion Football Club. It was a jointly organised session with The Football Fitness Federation. While it was nice to see some old friends and colleagues there it was especially good to see some of the students from the university attending as well. Seems like some of the messages that are being given to them about exploring other opportunities for professional learning and developing their networks are starting to sink in with them.
I was asked to present some thoughts on the future of applied sport science in football and the skills and attributes that may be needed to work within the industry in the future. It was a really nice topic and one that provided a great opportunity to share some ideas that I had had recently after listening to my newest audio book. I’d just started Adam Nicholson’s How to Be: Life lessons from the early Greeks when the concept of “Polytropous” was introduced as a description of the character Odysseus in the Odyssey. It seems that in the famous Greek poem Odysseus is an individual who is a very flexible in his ways of working. He is able to change his approach to problem solving according to the specific situation with which he is faced. This approach seems a perfect “fit” for the complex challenges that he faces on his adventures.
It seemed to me that being polytropic is a great way to think about the future practitioner within football as well. While it is difficult to predict the exact nature of the environment within a sport like football in the future it is clear that it will be complex, dynamic and unpredictable. This will require individual who want to work effectively within the sport to be:
“High level innovative critical thinkers that can specialize and generalize to problem solve and impact their environment in a complex world”
Who’d have thought that the terminiology and description that seemed to have so much relevance for future practice within sport science would have its origins in classical literature so long ago!
B.Drust@bham.ac.uk