AMERICAN SYSTEM CHURNS OUT STARS

IT is less than two weeks to the start of the Summer Universiade Games in Naples Italy.

These games are the world’s second largest international multi-sport event behind the Olympics and acts as a stepping stone to Tokyo 2020 and beyond.

The Australian team, nicknamed the UniRoos, will be made up of 184 elite student athletes from 65 universities, involved in 14 sports.

In the Taipei 2017 Summer Universiade, Australian athletes finished with nine medals – four gold, three silver and two bronze.

Australia’s best result came in 2015 in Gwangju, Korea, where we finished with a total of 19 medals, four gold, three silver and 12 bronze.

We have an abundance of talented athletes on the Gold Coast in many sports.

Griffith University is represented by Riley Day (sprints), Matthew Denny (throws) and Katie Hayward (walk) for athletics.

Grayson Bell, Charles Cox, Chelsea Hodges, Tristan Ludlow, Mikayla Messer, Joshua Parrish and Alice Stuart will compete in swimming.

Other athletes from Griffith include Jessica Borg and Presley Johnson in taekwondo and Sophie Milliken in water polo.

Another athlete making the trip to Naples is Moesha Johnson, who will represent the Southern Cross University in swimming.

For an athlete to be eligible to participate in the Universiade, they need to be an undergraduate or graduate students between the ages of 17 and 25 or have graduated in the year immediately preceding the year of the event.

Australian has a great history in international university sport. Those who have gone on to become Commonwealth Games and Olympic champions include Cate Campbell (swimming), Steve Hooker (athletics), Brooke Hanson (swimming), Steve Moneghetti (athletics), Ralph Doubell (athletics), Jon Sieben (swimming) and Michelle Timms (basketball).

Not surprising, the Universiade has been a platform where athletes have been identified for further national representation or have been approached by universities around the world for scholarship opportunities.

The chef de mission of the team, Liz Morgan-Brett, herself a volleyball Olympian knows how important these games are as a stepping stone to future performance.

“This is the best platform for athletes looking to go further,” she said.

“These student athletes will face challenges at the Summer Universiade that sets them up for the Commonwealth Games and Olympics.

“This is as close to Olympics as you can get.

“When I walked out into the opening ceremony in Kazan (2013 Summer Universiade) there were over 100,000 people there and it felt like walking out in Sydney (at the 2000 Olympics) again.” the A STUDY by UniSport Australia, the nation’s peak governing body of university sport, has found there is a legitimate pathway to national representation in Commonwealth and Olympic Games through the Universiade concept.

They also found that countries who finished high in the medal tally were using the pathway of university representation effectively.

saying this, I am promoting athletes who are looking to represent their country to aspire to pursue university studies.

In the US, a huge proportion of the country’s national team comes from the university system.

The US college system invests $1.5 billion a year to support their student athletes which caters for some 130,000 athletes who attend NCAA division 1 and 2 universities. These athletes represent the core of elite athletes in the US and is considered “the high performance pathway.”

It is no surprise that up to 90 per cent of Team USA is comprised of student athletes or those who have attended university.

There have been talks to collaborate with the Australian Institute of Sport and the AusIn tralian Olympic Committee to lobby the Federal Government with the aim of creating a program approaching the ideals of the US NCAA system.

My personal recommendation for young athletes is that they look at a higher education if they can. It will give them the opportunity to study, obtain further qualifications while also pursuing their love of sport and competition.