Talented Athlete Accreditation Scheme showcase video transcript

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I was incredibly lucky as a young athlete because my father was very keen on education. He just said to me all the time “education gives you choices”. My parents were massively supportive in my sporting career but they were very much “you need to get your education then you can go off and be a full-time athlete”.

The purpose of the dual career accreditation is to enable athletes to be able to have careers both in sport and across academic study as well, and these two marry together perfectly with the aims of the dual career accreditation.

It seems to me that we owe each generation the best that we've got, and TASS has got a great offer now and I think that its experiences, its network, its growing network needs to be shared that little bit more with our athletes that are just starting to make some choices a bit earlier on. Maybe they're a little bit younger than current TASS athletes. Mums and dads don't know the full picture and TASS has got a great network to help them make good decisions.

Student athletes shouldn't just have short term goals but should have lifelong career aspirations. For our student athletes we enable them to be able to train and to perform at the highest level possible but also to enable them to be able to have the academic qualifications to move through higher education and then into different career pathways from their professional sporting career.

When you're young and say you get injured or you know training is just not going right it sometimes can be easy just to say look I don't want to do this anymore, so having that balance in your life is massively important.

It's recognition of the hard work that our teachers, our coaches and our mentors have put in with all of our student-athletes to enable them to be effective performers, but also to enable them to get the qualifications that they need to move on to the next step in their pathway.

I think the accreditation scheme as part of TASS is critical isn't it if we're working in a high performance environment my aspiration is key and standards are always moving up, and to bring in such a scheme as this to encourage institutions to reach for that too, as well, and create the right type of environment it's invaluable isn't it - it's going to move everything forward.

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Talented Athlete Accreditation Scheme showcase video

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