The UWIC School of Sport is one of the largest providers of sport-related education in Great Britain with a strong tradition of physical education, sport & exercise science and sports performance. The School's innovative courses combine applied sports performance and coaching in addition to the more traditional academic subjects. UWIC staff is involved in research, consultancy, coaching and sport science support with a range of sports and find their Fusion Sport equipment to be one of the most used in the School, so much so that the School now has three 6 gate systems.

We interviewed Senior Lecturer in Exercise Physiology Dr. Michael Hughes about their use of SMARTSPEED and the benefits they are experiencing at the school.

Q: What are some of the applications you have been using at the School?

"The SMARTSPEED system is far more than a set of timing gates and we have made use of this system for a wide range of purposes from the basic timing of sprint performance, right through to programmed tests or training sessions using the reactive agility or pacing functions."

"Moving on from the use of SMARTSPEED in sprint testing, we have also used a wide range of agility drills both in the training and assessment of agility performance. The fact that this can also include planned and reactive agility adds great versatility to the equipment. We have found this versatility to be useful in teaching where a very simple demonstration of the progression from simple, planned agility tasks, through to the most complex reactive agility can be achieved without great difficulty. In training, our athletes and clients enjoy the variation from their more-standard sport-specific training sessions that the SMARTSPEED system affords."

"We have also found SMARTSPEED to be very useful in ways beyond sprint & agility performance. We have used SMARTSPEED to help us devise novel fitness test protocols for repeated sprint testing (e.g. variations of phosphate decrement testing) and training. These include a procedure whereby controlled (paced) exercise is combined with sprint testing in a procedure that was designed to replicate the demands of soccer match-play. Additionally, the pacing function has been valuable when aiming to control exercise intensity for research or training purposes."

"Additionally, we increasingly use the SMARTJUMP equipment to illustrate the principles of the stretch-shortening cycle characteristics in a range of tasks from squat jumps through to depth jumps or rebound jumping. For consultancy work with major sports governing bodies, we frequently use the SMARTJUMP system to provide us with reactive strength results. This seems especially valuable in talent identification schemes and routine fitness testing"

In addition to teaching and research at the School, SMARTSPEED is frequently used to perform consultancy based testing based services in the community. For example in the following video clip, UWIC staff were able to put 40 athletes through sprint, repeated sprint and jump testing  - a total of over 1000 results, in under 3 hours.

What do you see as the main benefits of the Fusion Sport equipment?

We find that our students, coaches and researchers can acquire the ability to use either of these systems in less than five minutes. In short, we are extremely pleased with our Fusion sport equipment and, in retrospect, it has opened up new dimensions to us in terms of sports performance, testing and research. Finally, we have always found the Fusion sport staff to be very receptive to our comments and feedback about the SMARTSPEED system and they have been instrumental in helping us to develop the applications that we have for SMARTSPEED.