For student Alana, sport is life and life is sport

For the love of the game

Sport and exercise student. Budding researcher. Triathlon NSW employee. Competitive athlete. UTS student Alana Leabeater lives and breathes (and works and studies) sport.

So it’s no surprise that she found herself enrolled in the UTS Bachelor of Sport and Exercise Science, a degree she combined with the Bachelor of Arts in International Studies.

“I picked sport and exercise science because I really liked PE at school,” she says.

“When I looked up the course offerings and that you could do a double degree with a year overseas, I thought yep, that sounds like me!”

Hands-on experience for a hands-on career

For Alana, choosing a sports-focused degree was more about following a passion than pursuing a distinct career path. As a competitive triathlete herself, she has a particular interest in the world of women’s sport – but beyond that, she didn’t have a set idea of where the degree might take her.

Roles in sport science have developed much more distinctly over the time I’ve been studying, so I didn’t come into this with a particular career in mind.

“The more I sampled subjects and the more I did placements and got practical experience, that led me down the path of where I wanted to go,” she says.  

Those practical placements included 12 months as a performance analyst at the NSW Institute of Sport as part of her degree, followed by a subsequent stint with the Penrith Panthers NRL team. During her year overseas as part of the international studies degree, she also volunteered as a National Olympic Committee Assistant at the 2018 Youth Olympics in Buenos Aires.

In the world of sport science, it’s what you know – and who

Access to world-class professional experiences are part and parcel of the Sport and Exercise Science program. Students are required to complete a minimum of 140 hours of professional placement with a sport or sport-related industry organisation, and many of these placements come about as a result of the teaching team’s extensive industry connections in the world of professional sport.

These connections are also great news for students, who can start building their own professional networks long before they graduate.

One of the greatest advantages of UTS is that the staff in sport and exercise science are extremely well regarded in the industry.

"They’re among the best in the world and they’re incredibly well connected,” says Alana, who secured a part-time role at Triathlon NSW during her studies.

"UTS has great facilities and yes, we have a great practicum program and we end up being accredited at the end of our degree, but I think one of the takeaways is that you get access to these researchers and lecturers who have unmatched contacts within the industry."

At the nexus of research and practice

Getting hands on in a range of professional sports environments during her degree fed Alana’s growing fascination with athlete management and the expertise required to support athletes and teams to achieve in their sport.

“For example, at a team like Penrith Panthers, you’ve got roles like nutritionists, all the strength and conditioning coaches, and then higher up you have all these high performance managers who look not just at the athletic side of a player’s career, but also their life off the field,” she says.

By the end of her third year, she’d all but decided to pursue a career as a high-performance manager in women’s sport.  Today, however, she’s no longer sure. Currently in her honours year, she’s halfway through a year-long research project focused on the AFL Women’s draft – and to her surprise, she’s finding the research experience much more captivating than she imagined.

I’m really passionate about women’s sport, so I’d really like to make a difference by getting more research out there and getting people talking about that in an open way.

"But at the same time, I’ve done internships with teams in a sport science capacity and I really liked the dynamic nature of working in professional team sport,” she says.

“I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive. Maybe I can do a bit of both!”

Find out more about studying sport and exercise at UTS