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"Studies in sports sciences make it possible to combine the field and the scientific approach.These courses are grounded in the field;quite quickly people need to be supervised and sports activities set up. In the theoretical part, we learn hox these practices draw on humanities, physiology and on research focused on sports and physical activities. The desire to improve practices motivated me to turn to research because I was also a professional athlete, I had an international career in land sailing. During my undergraduate studies, I focused on performance and training, and then an intellectual love at first sight for psychology led me to pursue a master's degree in psychology. That year, I passed a competitive examination and worked for two years as a consultant in a department of the Ministry of Sports in Val-de-Marne in order to finance my thesis in sports psychology.

The collaborations between researchers are what get things moving! When I was recruited in Brest, I established new collaborations with colleagues and we set up mental preparation programmes for professional athletes. This allowed us to go out into the field and meet coaches and athletes. My colleagues and I are also very quality conscious about our training and the professional integration of our students. This require a considerable amount of time;there aren't enough of us and we lack educational design skills. So little time is left for research, and that's very frustrating! Research is still structured according to a fairly patriarchal vision and gender inequalities persist. In sports science, we try to be exemplary by taking gender equality in account in our training and physical education teachers will be more aware than other teachers of how they impact their students."

Marjorie Bernier,
Senior lecturer, Physical Education and Sports Sciences (STAPS), CREAD, University of Western Brittany

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