Bursaries are a great way to help you achieve your fullest potential and as your Students’ Union, we want wants best for you! 

Past recipients include graphic design student Lucas Meldrum, a competitive windsurfer, who is using his bursary to help achieve his goal of being the British Champion!

Lucas began windsurfing at 10 years old and, thanks to the Sports Bursary, has been able to maintain his passion for the sport during his studies! He says the sports bursary is a ‘great opportunity to get some help’ and in the short video below chats with his trainer at Cornwall High Performance about his progress and the sports bursary scheme.

 

Click Image to watch Video.

 

Video Transcript

Lucas: Hi I’m Lucas. I’m a student at Falmouth University and I’m also a really keen windsurfer. I compete in UK events and try and do international events. Unfortunately we covid we haven’t had too many, too much going on but it’s been super important to keep up with the training, on the water and off the water here. Obviously I started here last year?

 

Sam: Yeah probably right into, right at the start of the first lockdown I think.

 

Lucas: Yeah, so I sort of reached out to the uni. They have a bursary, sports bursary scheme. So I thought that would be a great opportunity to get some help, to be able to come to a facility like this. It’s a great space. For me, I think it’s really important to maintain some strength off the water. You know, just simply injury prevention is a massive part of it. Feeling like, physically strong, and out there on the water I think it’s also a confidence thing for me. To know I’ve been working not just on the water, so when I’m out there I can take hard landings and stuff like that when I’m doing big jumps.

So I guess, this is Sam one of the trainers here. And do you want to explain a little bit about what you do here?

 

Sam: Yeah, I’ll go for it! Yeah so I run a business called High Performance, and we work with a high variety of athletes and non-athletes. Our main focus is on, it’s actually on 10-18 year old sporting individuals. Multiple sports, nearly every sport we’ve worked with. Having 70 plus kids come through our doors each week. Alongside that we have, kind of, many athletes, like Lucas, who are competing at a really good level, who we look to not only to improve them for their sport, but try and build all those good performance habits around that, and Lucas just touched on some of those already. So what we predominantly do with someone like Lucas who comes in, we look at them as an individual. We don’t look at him as a windsurfer, we look at him as Lucas the athlete, how he moves. See what kind of deficits he’s got so it might be a mobility problem, it might be flexibility issues, it might be strength, it might be power, it might be speed. It varies down to the individual. Then what we try and do is look at the demands of the sport, so for Lucas he’s already tapped into a little bit of that. The modern windsurfer these days, water sportsman, exactly the same in surfing as well, is the jump and landing sport. If it’s a jumping and landing sports there’s going to be lots of force going through the body. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out that if you’re absorbing big, high jumps you need to have some strength in the lower body, you need to have some good mechanics as well.

So we look at the demands on the sport, we look at the demands on the athlete. We try and marry the two together. And that’s exactly what we’ve done with Lucas. So we’ve been working on loads of strength with Lucas, loads of power, loads of force production, force absorbing to prep him for his jumps and lands out on the water and working on things that directly translate, not only into the water for him, but as he’s already alluded too, improving your quality of life outside and off the water as well.

We know it can be quite demanding and certain areas, the joints; ankles, knees hips, shoulders, they get a battering. So we’re looking to just kind of, you know, make sure everything in all those key areas is nice and robust and nice and strong. And really, for someone like Lucas, if he’s competing for the next 10 or 15 years, he wants to be doing this consistently, and this will be a key factor, a key performance indicator for him alongside his sport to keep improving his strength, and his movement, and his power, and all those kind of good things. To keep him in the water and keep him performing at a really high level.

 

Lucas: Yeah that’s very well explained. I just want to touch on, for example, you look at every individual and I came to you and I had a few little niggling problems with my ankles and my arms and so far, now I’m feeling really confident in both those things. My ankles are feeling good and I’m feeling good. Ove the summer I went and did a lot of training and my body was feeling very good so that’s down to, you know just staying consistent.

 

Sam: Yeah, that’s super super key.

 

Lucas: Hopefully this year, I can get some more support from the uni and we can continue working.

 

Sam: Yeah, now you’ve built a really good base for movement and you came in with some really athletic qualities. It’s about building on that, just like you’re saying in your sports, there’s always the next trick or the next thing you want to learn and master. It’s no different to in here, like I said earlier, if you are competing for 10 or 15 years, you want to be doing that.

 

Lucas: Yeah yeah, and starting now too.

 

Sam: After all those injuries yeah, sure.

 

Lucas: Perfect. Well, thank you Sam

 

Sam: Pleasure mate, hopefully we can continue to keep working and keep developing.

 

Lucas: Alright then

 

Sam: Awesome!