Alumna's project aims to help athletes achieve their dreams
26 April 2016
Hayley Gilchrist knows how difficult it can be to achieve sporting success when you don’t have the funding and resources to support you.
Originally from Dargaville, Hayley has a Bachelor of Sport and Leisure studies from the University of Waikato and a Postgraduate Diploma in sport and exercise science from AUT.
Having competed nationally in hurdling and athletics, Hayley saw a need for a professional profiling service for athletes that is affordable and accessible to non-funded athletes. She’s set up a Pledge Me page to raise funds for a start-up project to provide testing for athletes to develop a performance profile that can be used to compare performances between the athlete and the national and international standards of their chosen sport.
“This service is vital for athletes. You can’t achieve greatness if you don’t know where you’re starting from,” she says.
Called ProPerformance, the project’s mission is to provide athlete performance profiling services to talented athletes who might not have had access or the opportunity otherwise in order to advance in their chosen sport.
“A quote from a speaker at a high school sports awards evening has always stuck with me, and something I thought about often when I was developing this project. The speaker said that 80% of the people in the room that evening wouldn’t continue with their sport after high school.
“It was a hard thing for me to hear because everyone in that room was living and breathing their sport, so it was basically accepted that their circumstances would change and they would no longer be involved with their sport after finishing high school.”
Hayley says that being a female in the sport and exercise industry also has its challenges, something she hopes ProPerformance can help address.
“Sometimes I feel like I have to work three times harder to get a quarter of the opportunities available to my male counterparts. So I’ve decided to create the opportunity for myself and fill what I see as a real gap in the market for a service like this.”
Open-access athlete profiling is a service currently not available in the Waikato region, and funds raised will go towards purchasing athlete testing equipment and to cover initial marketing and administration costs.
“I’d also like to use the programme to provide sport and exercise students the opportunity to complete work experience requirements for their study and to show them practical applications of sports science outside the lab.”
Visit Hayley’s Pledge Me page for more information.