Editorial
Article Outline
It is timely that we have an issue dedicated to team-sport research as there has been increasing interest in this area over the last few years. This has been reflected in recent conferences with a very successful, inaugural team-sport conference held at the Australian Institute of Sport in 2006, dedicated team-sport sessions at the Australian Association for Exercise and Sport Science (AAESS) conference, and the football conference in Turkey in 2007.
With the inaugural team-sport issue, we have done our best to represent the breadth of what constitutes the team-sport research being conducting internationally. There is research from a number of disciplines (physiology, biomechanics, sports medicine and sports injury prevention) that covers a variety of different team-sports (lacrosse, Australian (rules) football, soccer, netball, basketball). Pleasingly, this research ranges from descriptive studies to predictors of performance and injury to a training intervention in a “real-world” setting.
Given the emerging status of team-sport research, it is not surprising that much of the published research (including that presented here) is descriptive in nature. High-quality descriptive research is essential to inform research strategies that will lead to real improvements in performance and injury prevention. However, it could be argued that currently far too much of team-sport research is descriptive and that we need to move away from studies that simply describe what is occurring.
The challenge for researchers therefore, is to use the results of the available descriptive research to develop innovative hypotheses and to design well-controlled studies that will ultimately lead to strategies that will improve team-sport performance. In some cases, laboratory studies involving invasive techniques will be required. There are however, researchers who disagree with this approach and argue that it is a waste of time doing research outside of the “real world”, research that does not involve team-sport athletes in a field setting. My response is, why worry about wasting months when you could be wasting decades? Without a solid mechanistic base, most applied team-sport research is likely to be hit and miss and more importantly, unlikely to achieve its ultimate goal which is to improve performance. A similar argument was made by Finch1 in a paper setting the scene for the necessary research directions for sports safety, including injury prevention in team sports. Hopefully our next team sport issue will contain not only high-quality descriptive research, but also mechanistic research and research that applies the findings from mechanistic studies in a “real-world” setting.
Reference
PII: S1440-2440(07)00016-3
doi:10.1016/j.jsams.2007.01.007
© 2007 Published by Elsevier Inc.
