Hello and welcome to a brief presentation on the undergraduate programmes at the
Department of Sport Science at Stellenbosch University.
I’m going to be highlighting the BSc of Sport Science specifically within this presentation.
My name is Simon de Waal. I’m a lecturer and the undergraduate committee chairperson at the Department.
I’d like to start with a brief lesson from my 12 years in tertiary education thus far.
I’ve put in a little quote there saying it’s not about what teachers cover, it’s about what students discover.
I want you to keep this in mind as I move through this presentation,
is that while we have a unique and a fantastic offering at the Department of Sport Science,
there are many routes and avenues that you could take within tertiary education to get
a unique and an amazing qualification. However, the goal for me when I see students and
when I see students moving forward into their careers as well, is to find students who are
really passionate about something, who really want to pursue something
and make a success of themselves within their career, whatever that career choice might be.
Here you can see an overview of the Coetzenberg Campus.
This is where the Department of Sport Science is located at Stellenbosch.
Really, this is an extension of our classroom. You have a number of world-class fields and facilities around the Department.
The Department is the building at the back of this image in the centre.
Then the building in front, the smaller building in front is the Coetzenberg Centre where the graduations take place at the university.
You also have the Maties Gymnasium
where you see that large outdoor pool which is attached to the Department of Sport Science.
But you can also see the world-renowned Danie Craven Stadium, the rugby stadium on the left-hand side,
Coetzenberg Athletic Stadium on the right, our secondary rugby fields in the middle of the photo, soccer fields.
Various soccer and cricket fields, hockey AstroTurfs.
There’s a tennis complex, netball courts. We use all of these facilities within
the sport science degree programme for practical classes, teaching and learning, and training.
Just highlighting a few of the locations within the building itself.
In blue, this is where we give our classes. We have five halls that can all cater for between 50 and 100 students.
We also have some clinical training labs, we’ve got a motor learning lab, we’ve got an anatomy lab,
biokinetic centre, kinderkinetic centre, high-performance hub, and the offices of the staff who work there.
That’s where a lot of the teaching and learning takes place, the majority of it.
But we also have some practical halls. We’ve got a dance hall, a multipurpose sports hall,
an indoor basketball court, indoor swimming pool, 25 m pool, and a lot of our practical classes take place
within those halls, especially when we need to get out of the sun in the hot Stellenbosch summer.
We have highlighted in green here the CAF Neuromechanics Lab.
It’s essentially a biomechanics laboratory where there’s very high-tech equipment that we use to teach our
students biomechanical skills, biomechanical analysis. We also have an exercise physiology
lab where we teach students how to measure physiological parameters with athletes.
We have the Maties Gymnasium in red. This is a typical gymnasium setup, but our students
do have discounted rates there and we also do teaching and learning within the Maties Gymnasium,
working with athletes and sedentary people.
Just a brief history on the Department of Sport Science.
It’s almost been 90 years now since the Department was founded by Dr Ernst Jokl.
Initially it was housed within the Faculty of Education and it was a three-year Diploma
in Physical Education, reflecting the needs in the market at that time in South Africa.
It then changed or it then obtained departmental status in 1940
before eventually becoming the Department of Human Movement Studies in 1980, reflecting
a change in the course content and the demands within the market.
Later it was changed to the Department of Sport Science, which it still is now.
Then very recently we joined the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, moving away from the Faculty of Education.
We managed to salvage the academic year both last year and in 2020.
And we’ve been divided into three divisions, the Division of Sport Science, the Division of Biokinetics and Kinderkinetics,
and the Division of Sport and Exercise Medicine.
All courses that we currently offer are being reviewed for possible renewal in the coming years.
We are looking to recurriculise further and update our syllabus as we move forward
with the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences.
Our current vision is to be the leading sport science department in South Africa.
Our mission is to lead the students that we have with excellence so that they may become leaders in their field
by providing and exposing them to high-quality teaching, research, and social impact projects.
We also aim to offer academic programmes and research that focus on market-related needs
and that serve the South African society. Then we want to utilise our physical
and human assets and resources optimally so that we may advance our Department,
the Faculty and University, as well as society in general.
Our vision for 2040 is to be the leading research-intensive sport science department in and for Africa.
This is a major focus of Stellenbosch University, is to improve our research footprint and impact and we are aligned with that.
Just a little bit about myself. I’m a former undergraduate student at the Department of Sport Science.
I completed my undergraduate honours and master’s all at the Department of Sport Science.
I’m now registered for a PhD as well.
I’m a representative on the Arts and Social Sciences Faculty side and we do have a BSc representative as well, of course,
who also serves on the undergraduate committee with me.
If you have any questions or queries related to his degree programme, you’re most welcome to contact me.
My contact details are on the slide.
A unique aspect of the Department of Sport Science is that we are housed or we resort under four different faculties.
Although we are organisationally housed within the Faculty of Medicine and Health Science
and our honours, master’s, and PhD programmes resort under the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences,
we have two undergraduate programmes which resort under the Faculty of Arts and Faculty of Science respectively.
I’m going to highlight the BSc programme moving forward.
We also then offer a few service modules to the Faculty of Education,
specifically within their postgraduate certificate in education and physical education.
The BSc programme is the one that you see in the centre. It’s a three-year degree programme.
You’ll have a dual major either in physiology or biochemistry, something to that nature, and
then you’ll have your BSc in Sport Science major. What you can do with this degree moving forward,
after your undergraduate studies, is you could go on to do an Honours in Physiology if you like.
You can also go and do a Postgraduate Certificate in Education where you can train
to become a teacher and teach something like Life Sciences because of your BSc background.
Then what the students commonly, the choice that they commonly utilise is either to move into a
BSc in Biokinetics, a BSc Honours in Performance Sport or a BSc in Kinderkinetics.
These are three honours programmes offered within the Department of Sport Science and you can do
any of those, whatever your preference is and where your interests lie.
Obviously, there is a selection procedure and minimum standard to get into those honours programmes.
Then you can also move forward to do a Master’s Degree in Sports Science or a PhD in Sports Science.
As you can see, those are all resorting under the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences.
You really have a wide array of opportunities and different routes that
you can go, depending on your interests, whether you’re more practical or theory orientated,
whether you want to be in a performance or clinical setting,
working with children. There are a number of opportunities for our graduates to pursue.
Then for BSc incoming students, you need a Grade 12 average of 65% (excluding Life Orientation)
in order to qualify for this degree programme. You need to take Afrikaans or English,
either Home Language or First Additional Language at a Level 4, 50%.
You need to get at least 50% for Physical Sciences and 60% for Mathematics,
and then any other university admission subject a minimum of 50% in order to be able to apply for this degree programme.
You also need to be medically fit. There’s a medical history form you’ll need to complete prior to registering with us.
This is because of the physical nature of the sport science programme.
If you have any questions about that, you can contact our admissions officer and her details are at the end of this presentation.
Then theory modules in the undergraduate programme. In first year our BSc students take anatomy.
They only take anatomy on the Coetzenberg Campus, the rest of their classes are all on main campus.
They do have some practicals in the first year with us as well. I’ll get to those later.
In the second year subjects like motor learning, motor control, exercise physiology,
teaching and programme development, adaptive movement programmes, applied biomechanics,
sport and recreation management.
The nice thing about these classes is that you will sit together with your BA classmates
in these specific classes and get to forge and develop new friendships with them as well.
Then in the third year you’ll spend a lot more time on Coetzenberg Campus with us.
You’ll be doing sports injuries, peak performance, testing and measurement, sport psychology, and sport ethics.
As I mentioned earlier, you will also have a very strong practical component to this degree.
We really pride ourselves on the sport practicals and this is something we’re looking to renew moving froward as well.
In first year you’ve got some compulsory sports that you need to take, swimming,
soccer, indigenous games, and then an elective of a summer and a winter sport.
In second year, gymnastics and fitness with an elective of a summer and a winter sport.
Just keeping in mind that our focus in the first-year practicals is on skill acquisition, learning the game,
the rules of the game and how to play effectively. Then in second year it’s on coaching the sports
themselves, so how to teach others to play those sports, which is a great skill to learn as well.
Then in the third year you continue with sport practicals, gymnastics, dance, and games where
the focus is on developing lesson plans with outcomes that you try to achieve and assessment of those outcomes.
So, really challenging you to think critically about what are people learning within a sporting environment.
Then you have the opportunity to do laboratory work
in kinanthropometry, functional anatomy, strength and conditioning, and field testing.
These are catered towards learning critical skills that a sport scientist will need
moving forward into the work space. You’ll also be able to do a specialisation,
an applied kinesiology module where you’ll choose between fitness, coaching, and adapted physical
activity or disabilities where you would work mainly with persons with disabilities.
You choose one of these specialisations and the goal here is to
integrate all of our undergraduate programme content within these different environments.
Either working with people looking to
improve their physical activity or their fitness goals, so either athletes or sedentary persons;
working in a coaching environment, individual and team sports;
or working in an adapted movement environment within either coaching or fitness.
You’ll have the opportunity to go on and exchange in the third year if you qualify and if you’re
interested at Linnaeus University in Sweden. We do a three-week exchange to and from there.
Over the course of seven years we’ve had 96 students who went over and 8 staff members, including myself.
I had the privilege to go over. Then we invite the students and staff to come to us as well.
We unfortunately postponed or cancelled these in 2021 and 2022 for the students.
However, from 2023 onwards we do plan to continue with this programme and our goal there is really to learn how
the field of sports science looks in Sweden and use that as a reference point for what we do in South Africa.
We find that our students learn a lot when they do go over on that exchange.
Just finishing up with careers. I want to come back to the lesson that I said earlier.
The students, the people that I’ve seen leave the Department over the
last 12 years, the ones who go on to make a success,
they make a success in whatever field they end up in, but only because of their own doing,
because of their passion, their hard work, and their drive. You really can see on this slide,
for example, there’s a lot of different fields and opportunities you could move into.
But really keep in mind that sports science is something that you do, it’s not just something that you study.
And so, you might work with athletes, you might work with people in a clinical rehabilitative setting,
people with chronic disease, youth, adults, geriatric populations.
We can really work with a wide variety of people within a sport
and exercise setting and you need to go and find that passion in yourself.
A short survey or brief survey we did at the end of last year with our alumni at the Department,
113 people who have graduated between 2016 and 2017 on average and with a large majority having
already going on to postgraduate study. Just to give you an idea of where our graduates do end up.
The good news is that the overwhelming majority of them are employed.
There’s only three who were unemployed at the time and 15 who were studying.
Then we’ve got a lot of people working within coaching, either within a professional or amateur setting.
Within education, normally fulfilling a dual role as a teacher and a sport scientist or coach.
Within the sports science setting, biokinetics, rehab, chronic disease setting.
Sports administrators, sports coordinators, directors of sport.
Some who’ve left the field of sports science
and then some smaller areas, niche areas like strength and conditioning, personal training,
working within a laboratory, being a researcher, a data scientist, etc.
If you have any administrative questions, you’re welcome to contact either
Ms Botha, she’s our secretary at the Department, or Ms Uys who deals with admissions.
Their contact details are on the slide.
Then lastly I just want to say thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it, I hope it was informative,
and I look forward to welcoming you on the Coetzenberg Campus in the near future. Goodbye.