shooting hoops with olympians.

After our usual breakfast in the dining hall, we had our first lecture of the day about Sports Psychology given by Amanda Palmer, a psychologist at AIS who works with netball, volleyball, football, and basketball. I have not taken a sports psychology class, so I found her lecture to be extremely interesting. She focused a lot on treating the athlete as a whole person because all psychological issues that they may encounter through their sport are likely to transfer over to their personal life and vice versa. She also did a great job of combining both the physical role and the psychological role to the treatment of an athlete when recovering from an injury, which made it more applicable to us.

Next on our schedule for the day, was a tour of the sports science and sports medicine building, where all of AIS’ research takes place. Our guide was Clare, a physiologist that works in AIS’ physiology (obviously). She showed us both the biomechanics lab and the physiology lab. In the biomechanics lab, they were currently measuring the bowling movement of cricketers. They were also testing something with sprinters on their indoor track containing ten force plates—which is a lot of force plates for one lab because most have one or two if they are lucky. In the physiology lab, they were collecting the air exhaled by rowers as they were on stationary bike. Currently, the men’s rowing team is staying in the altitude apartments of the AIS for three weeks. For those three weeks, they have their regular training schedule, but then they live in the altitude apartment. The altitude apartments have the barometric pressure controlled so that it would be like they are living at an altitude of 3000 ft. This way they are able to get the benefits of their actual training and also the benefits of increased red blood cell count from living at a higher altitude. To follow their progress, the rowers come into the physiology lab every day to get their blood drawn and to have their exhaled air collected.

When we finished our lunch, it was time to head to the netball courts where we were going to learn how to play netball. However, once we got there we found out that there was an error in scheduling the netball courts, so instead there were two Australian Olympic basketball players who were going to teach us basketball. While they were obviously better players than us, it just felt slightly ironic that we were being taught how to play basketball from Australians. Luckily, they turned it into a couple of drills and then to playing 3 on 3 and then 5 on 5. We played for about an hour and it was actually really fun. It’s also pretty cool to say that we were shooting hoops with Olympic basketball players! One was named Maddie, who was actually going to play at Virginia Tech starting in August and I cannot remember the name of the male player, but he was also just 18—such a weird concept that they are younger than us.

Between basketball and dinner, we had a couple hours of break so I took advantage of that time to catch up on my travel journals and organize all the pictures I have taken on this trip. After dinner, we all went back to the small common room and had another movie night. We watched Total Recall this time—we are all extremely excited for tomorrow night when we go to the rugby game simply because it is something to do.