they want to be able to deal with the stressors of working in the environment.
Not just as an athlete but as a business person and as a human.
One of the chief ideas and goals of PAADS is
to promote the actual field of athlete development.
We have recognized that people are coming in from various different backgrounds and
specialties.
When we first started meeting together in 2003, and
before organizing the actual organization, we realized that there were people coming
in with sports medicine background, people coming in with psychological background.
Social sciences, business, legal, so it was really interesting to see that there
is this broad group of professionals that were working in one field.
And so what we decided to do was to brainstorm and figure out what were
the consistencies across organizations and how they worked with the athletes.
And find out what were some of the differences and
see if those would meld together.
So what we did was we created a education committee.
Went through and I identified what are the consistent topics and
educational pieces that we need as a professional in
the space of athlete development to work with the athletes, to help educate them.
And then we matched those specific concrete ideas
with looking at different universities across the US that have sports management
programs and tried to figure out what were the similarities and differences there.
So in order to grow the sport, we started reaching out to universities and
Florida has become an actual educational partner, we hope to get more.
But the whole point is we want to institutionalize the concept and
the field itself of athlete development.
So people can work with athletes when they're from a grassroots level,
whether it's in high school, university, olympic sport.
So they realize when they work with the athletes what are the pressures on
the athlete.
How can we work with the athlete to make them understand what their role is?
And also how can we empower them to perform at their best level?
It's not necessarily physically, It's more of educating them on,
how the organizations that they represent work,
what their role is in that organization.
And also what's the impact of them behaving in a specific way?
How does that help them, how does that help the sport,
how does that help basically everybody win financially?
Well first to go back to what are the actual content areas themselves?
We talk on a broad range.
We're looking at the players and
the people who work with them to have a general understanding of some key parts.
Most people will specialize in one content area, but we think it's important for
them to have a base understanding of the different content areas that there are.
So what we're saying when we say athlete development as far as content is
an understanding of sports science disciplines.