Over a course of 2 days, a group of 50 Year 2 students from Republic Polytechnic Diploma in Sports and Leisure Management popped by Singapore Gymnastics for a field trip. The purpose of the excursion was to find out more on how National Sports Associations (NSAs) operate at the back end which in this case, they were to observe the way Singapore Gymnastics operates. 2 of our current interns, Sean and Kaeson are also from the same diploma 

The field trip was separated into 2 segments, the first being a presentation done by General Manager Karen Norden and the second being a tour of the Rhythmic Gymnastics High Performance training facility in OCBC Arena. The presentation was based around Singapore Gymnastics’ structure, history and vision and also touched on athlete tracking and monitoring, sports development as well as increasing participation in sport. It wasn’t just the students who benefitted from the presentation, even the lecturers were exposed to new knowledge. 

Lecturer Mr Simon said, “When teaching my students, we only teach the Long Term Athlete Development (LTAD) programme on a very basic level but today, we were all exposed to a very detailed and in depth version of the LTAD which is great for the students.”

Some common misconceptions among the students were cleared up. In fact, this added on to what the students had learnt during their recent assignments and submissions focusing on NSAs.

Student Ming Xuan said, “Before coming to the NSAs, I thought that NSA only takes charge of the coaches and development of athletes only. Now that I have visited Singapore Gymnastics, I found out that NSA does not only take care of coaches and development of athletes, but they also take care of the health, psychological mind of the athletes.”

This was shown in during the tour of the facility, where the students were able to visit the rehabilitation gym, the room where athletes go to have their psychological assessment and other facilities that are available to the National Athletes.

There is a strong likelihood that some of the them will end up as part of an NSA after graduation and we hope this field trip teases and excited thes students of what is to come in a possible career in the sports.