In my previous blog I talked about how I ended up working at Team Bath Sports Injury Clinic as a sports massage therapist and later a tutor for Team bath Training and Development. I said I would tell you a little more about my work at Team Bath so here goes.
you have to follow your passions
Casual Contract
I initially started as a casual contract member of staff. That meant I was on a zero hour contract and if I remember rightly as it was a long time ago I did a couple of half days a week. Eventually that developed into being a permanent member of staff, I think doing two days a week.
Progressing Within Team Bath Sports Injury Clinic
When I started, I wasn’t let loose of professional athletes just general public, University of Bath staff and students. Along with the amateur and bucks athletes. Finally, after some time working in the clinic this started to change and develop. I started working with some of the professional athletes on and off. These were mainly winter sports but also covered tennis, netball, modern pentathlon and more.
Other opportunities started to arise. This included traveling on a training camp with one of the winter sports and working with EIS. I’ll be honest here, I wasn’t looking for a career working with professional athletes, I had my own business and that’s what I wanted to focus on. With this in mind, I never pursued traveling with professional athletes or even working with them, as you can’t give either your full commitment. Don’t get me wrong I enjoyed working with athletes but I’m not sure I enjoyed the 5 hour delay coming back from Latvia.
I have seriously condensed 7 years of working at the University of Bath into a paragraph just to give you an idea of what the opportunities are working somewhere like Team Bath. I’m not going to name people but you can see how things can progress for general public to professional athletes.
The People I Got to Work With
The other side of working somewhere like Team Bath Sports Injury Clinic and of more interest to me was the people I worked with. I worked in an environment with a massive amount of knowledge and some pretty nice people too. I had been self employed from day one of my career and hadn’t had anyone to learn tips and tricks of off. This meant any new knowledge had to be through causes. This gave me a fantastic opportunity to learn from the people around me. This includes some of the physio there and also my lead.
The lead massage therapist trained in America (as he is American) and their training is very different to ours. Its much more in-depth than the training we get here, far greater knowledge in so many areas, such as anatomy and physiology, testing and so on. I had privilege to work with him for a few years and gained a lot of knowledge from him.
So, there you go a brief outline of what working somewhere like Team Bath Sports Injury Clinic looks like. As you can see it’s always wise to take every opportunity you can. I may still have been there now if I hadn’t wanted to pursue my own business so much. With things like this you have to follow your passions, so it could have quite easily been to work with professional athletes but it wasn’t but I did still have the luxury of trying on for size.
