Sport, Health & Wellbeing
UnCover Video: Riley’s data-driven research aims to help elevate women in sport
Riley Brassington grew up in Canberra as a big sport fan – his favourite was rugby league.
When the opportunity to do something related to the sport presented itself, the PhD candidate at the University of Canberra jumped at it without hesitation – in the process, he is providing meaningful research that will help current and future women athletes.
“I saw that UC was advertising the 50-50 Women in Sport scholarships, and with the help of Associate Professor Julie Cooke, I decided to apply for it, even though my background was a bit different to others,” says Riley.
“My interest in women’s sport was spurred by my background in clinical exercise physiology and strength and conditioning, where I saw that there was such a big disparity in interest among genders at the youth or developmental levels.”
With this in mind, Riley decided to focus his PhD on the match demands and physical capabilities of elite and sub-elite women’s rugby league players. He aims to better understand the requirements needed for developing players to reach the elite level. As part of the 50-50 Women in Sport Scholarship scheme, he has been working with Canberra Raiders NRLW team as a sports scientist, and also as the team’s assistant strength and conditioning coach.
“We're finding that the elite athletes tend to be able to jump higher, develop more power and are generally more aerobically fit, which seems obvious, but we're looking at figuring out the why,” says Riley.
“So we’re looking at training ages, training experience, years of playing the sport – especially since women’s rugby league is a part-time sport at the moment and you have a lot of women athletes playing union and 7s as well, and they have different requirements.”
“We also want to look some GPS data with which we can track things like the speeds that they hit and the intensity they reach during matches. Hopefully we can use all the data that we’re gathering to educate us on how to optimise developing youth athletes to take the next step.”
Riley says that being embedded within an elite professional sports club has been a valuable experience, and has allowed him to explore a broader range of options and data for his research.
“Being here at the ground level at training, at games, traveling with the team – it allows me to get a different insight from a research point of view and also allows me to collect data and have access to information that I probably wouldn't be able to get otherwise,” says Riley.
“It’s also made me more invested in the team and the players and all their successes because of the relationships I’ve built – it’s just another aspect that shows why this scholarship is great.”
Words by Mike Verzosa. Image and video by John Massielo.