Paul Fisher: The development of a third-level athletic development program
In this new and innovative position at the ATU Donegal campus in Letterkenny, my main role is the provision of athletic development practices to our sports teams and sports scholarship athletes.
The sports scholarship program has been upgraded in recent years by Michael Murphy (ATU Donegal, Head of Sport), the program rewards the successful students’ athletic ability and previous achievements but also assists these young athletes in developing their sporting ability simultaneously with their academic progress by putting in place essential supports such as access to on-campus individual strength and conditioning programs or supervision of existing programming.
Working within the academic calendar our initial aim early in the semester is to profile and screen our athletes before beginning our supervised collective gym sessions. The testing sessions aim to assess the athlete’s anthropometrics, power, speed, strength, and fitness to inform any interventions. The follow-up sessions are used to track our athletes’ progress.
In 2023, in a new academic collaboration with our final-year sports students, we provided normative data from our athletes' pre and post-intervention for research purposes. Excitingly, the work with the sports department is growing and will see us work closely with PhD students in the coming academic year. The mix of applied sports science and research is an area that I really enjoy my current role and look forward to seeing how far we can progress.
Once we have identified the athletes' needs and have planned their schedule(s), our teams and scholarship athletes begin working on their specific programs right through the semester / academic year under constant supervision, in our campus high-performance gym, with access to leading sports technology and software. Objective protocols such as velocity-based training (VBT) have been a popular introduction to our athletes' programs.
It is early days for the program but our teams and athletes are competitive at national and international levels in various sports.
Background:
Paul Fisher is an assistant lecturer in sport and exercise science at and is currently the athletic development coach for ATU Donegal sports teams and sports scholarship athletes.
Paul has obtained a Masters by Research (MRes.) at ATU Donegal and investigated running loads in elite Gaelic football. and a BSc. in Sports and Exercise Science from Ulster University.
Research link: https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4663/10/8/117
Paul was previously head of strength and conditioning for the Donegal GAA minors, under 20 and seniors, Donegal senior ladies, and Derry City Football Club.
X: @PaulFisher17
IG: paulfisherstrength