New Zealand Football’s Player Welfare Team got a huge amount of value from hosting the annual Sports Performance and Prevention Conference recently in Auckland. The Conference brought together a wide range of industry experts from across the New Zealand sporting spectrum, as well as invited international professionals, for a valuable learning and sharing opportunity in NZ Sport. The Conference, which was presented by New Zealand Football’s Fit4Football in partnership with ACC SportSmart and Axis Sports Medicine Specialists, was delivered by New Zealand Football’s Player Welfare team (Fit4Football). We caught up with New Zealand Football Medical Director Dr. Mark Fulcher to discuss how the conference will improve the Player Welfare programme which New Zealand Football runs here in New Zealand.

What was New Zealand Football’s involvement in delivering the Sports Performance and Prevention Conference?

New Zealand Football’s Player Welfare team developed and delivered the conference from start to finish.  We partnered with ACC SportSmart and Axis Sports Medicine Specialists to provide a learning and sharing opportunity for NZ sports stakeholders from medical to strength and conditioning to psychology. 

It is a sharing of best practice from around the world – who contributed and what were the sessions like?

We had a speaker from Switzerland called Dr Jiri Dvorak who has been involved in injury prevention for a long time and ran the medical services at FIFA for about 20 years. He has a special interest in sports concussion. We had an expert Dr Michael Makdissi from Melbourne who is also an expert on concussion. We also had some injury prevention specialists from NSW like Matt Whalan. Matt is a physiotherapist and is currently completing his PhD in injury prevention in football at The University of Wollongong, We also had representatives from a range of different sports in New Zealand. We had Sharon Kearney from Netball NZ, and we had Bruce Hamilton and Fiona Mather who are the Director and the Physical Therapy Director respectively at High Performance Sport NZ. We had Dr John Sampson who is has extensive industry and knowledge and expertise across many Australian sports codes.  John is a Sports Scientist and has been a Senior Lecturer at The University of Wollongong for the past nine years. Prior to moving to Australia he worked with Premier League Football and Super League Rugby clubs in the UK as a sports performance consultant. We had key themes presented in each section of the day; Clinical considerations, Practical perspective, concussion and return to play.  The level of speakers and content was very high.

What was some of the feedback like from the Conference?

We received extremely positive feedback. It was very practical. One of the things we focus on is to give people something they can apply to their work on Monday morning or the following weekend when their team is in action. The format was nice and short, punchy talks. Nothing more than 30 minutes. The format was received very well and it allowed us to cover a range of different topics.

This the third year that this conference has been run, but it has recently gone through a re-brand?

Injury Prevention is something, as healthcare professionals, we are all very interested in. If you are a coach or you are in a strength and conditioning role, your KPI is to win games and help your athletes perform at the best of their ability.  We really wanted to put an emphasis on performance. We know that teams who suffer far less injuries are far more likely to succeed. There are some really good stats coming out of the Champions League. If you are team that has less injuries, you are more likely to win both your domestic league and also the Champions League. There are also some good stats around Olympic medallists. If you are available to train and compete more regularly then you are far more likely to win a medal so we really wanted to focus on performance rather than prevention.

The conference was a nice fit with the re-naming of the Injury Prevention Team to the Player Welfare team as we take on the idea of a more holistic offering? 

Yes that is right. It is something that we are actively working on every day as we look to improve the player experience. If people are getting injured less and staying healthy they are much more likely to stay in the game for a longer time. These things are really important for football in New Zealand.

You have been around football for a long time, what have been some of the improvements in this space?

There is increasing awareness about the need to be better in Player Welfare. I think over the past 10- 20 years most of the Injury Prevention strategies have been things that people thought might be a good idea – like stretching and hydration – where actually if you look at the evidence and science those things don’t always work so well. There are a number of things that we know now that have been scientifically proven to work, like warming up differently like doing some strengthening exercises as part of your warm up, which make a practical difference. If you go around the country you are seeing much more of that activity and that sort of injury prevention.

It must be great for New Zealand Football to be a leader in this space for Player Welfare?

It is a real point of difference. All of the major sports in this country are doing work in this space. But we are very lucky that the medical team at FIFA have developed work that is very football specific which we have been able to deliver in New Zealand and share with ACC SportSmart the other major sporting codes. There are opportunities for us to learn from the likes of rugby and rugby league in things like the concussion space, but football has been a leader in injury prevention.

What did you personally take from the Sports Performance and Prevention Conference?

The thing I got from it was the collegiality. There are people out there who want to do more than just treat injury. There is an increasing group who want to prevent injury from happening. The ability to work as a team. Often I would identify or diagnose a certain injury but try to engage with a team to ensure a plan is being delivered. It was a great networking event. It was good to identify ideas of how we can work better and improve the patient experience. We have some strategies that we think are pretty good. To have those strategies validated by some industry experts from around the world was very gratifying. There were a couple of good work-ons as well. We know that kids are playing too much sport so how are we going to channel our work in that space. We do a pretty good job with concussion and education, but there is scope to do a better job in that space. So there a couple of good take-homes there and ideas for future initiatives.

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