I know therapists who have been working in sport for 20

years but who are no better now than they were after two years of involvement. Never switch off! If you feel you are losing effectiveness, rekindle you passion by observing the work of another enthusiastic and effective therapist. Your dress, your behaviour with others, and your therapeutic actions should reflect effective purpose.

ORGANISATION Your working environment Always arrange your work environment so that it looks effective and organised. Keep your working space clear and clean. If the head coach or chief executive officer of the team or club walks in, you want their impressions to be that your goals are aligned with those of the team. Keep the working environment at a temperature that is comfortable for your athletes first and for you second. Throughout my career I have worked and observed in

■ Sensitivity to the needs and expectations of the athlete with regard to training and competition ■ Knowledge of the sport in which the athlete is involved ■ Basic knowledge of sports nutrition, physiology of exercise and massage ■ Physical fitness and, ideally, involvement in a sporting activity ■ Enthusiasm and energy.

EFFECTIVENESS Be very clear about the team’s objectives. Instil the same objectives in you and your massage therapist colleagues. First and foremost, always focus on the job required of you. The role of any support person involved in sport is to

remove obstacles from the path of an athlete in order to allow the athlete to perform at their optimal level. You must bring to the team or organisation something

that’s needed – for example, to monitor the impact of training and playing on the soft tissue system by providing effective assessment and hands-on treatment skills to positively impact on these potentially adverse factors. To quantify this, we keep player records, which clearly outline assessment pre- and post-treatment, such as range of motion in the sports-critical joint regions. Objectives, organisation and good quality records are important for the following reasons: ■ To be able to prioritise which structures need treatment more urgently than others ■ To be able to feed back valuable information to other members of the support staff so that changes can be made to squad and individual training loads ■ To provide information that allows you to have meaningful conversations with other support staff and therefore to develop meaningful relationships ■ To provide data that substantiate your worth to the team.

In order to maximise your effectiveness, always think

about your purpose for performing a particular assessment and technique. Think: “If the team doctor were standing at my shoulder, could I explain fully what and why I’m doing what I’m doing?”

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a huge variety of working environments – the very good, the very bad and the very ugly. Some of the things I find particularly non-effective and ugly in a working environment including the following: ■ Practitioners lying on tables – if you are not busy, do something to help the team and the environment or get out of sight ■ Practitioners reading newspapers on treatment tables – nothing conveys unproductiveness to me more than this. If you want to read a paper, do so in your own time and in your own private space ■ Practitioners watching television with the volume excessively loud and getting too involved in the wrong activity – this tells me as an athlete, coach or administrator that the practitioner is easily distracted and bored with the job.

You may well find yourself on a trip with athletes, coaches or administrators who do all of these things. The important thing is to maintain your own high standards at all times.

The linen supply One of the first things you may need to do when you arrive with your team at a new hotel, venue or event is to organise a reliable supply of clean linen. Over my years of travel, I have found that gifts of bottles of wine for the hotel cleaning staff work wonders. You can usually get what you want if you are respectful of, and courteous to, these members of staff. ■ Have a place for soiled linen and send it off for washing regularly ■ Keep the clean linen properly organised.

I once worked at an international tournament in Hobart,

Tasmania, providing on-field treatment. One particular day was very windy and some of the clean linen was exposed to the elements. Later that day, while I was working at the hotel, two athletes reacted adversely to the treatment, presenting with excessively itching skin. The condition settled quickly, but the cause seemed to be some pollen in the linen that arrived in the strong wind. This was a lesson well learned – and it never happened

again.

The set-up Always set up in the most conspicuous location possible. If

sportEX dynamics 2008;18(Oct):17-19