[Floodlights and football pitch at night]
[Gabriel Knowles, NWS National Premier League football coach, coaching players]
[Football players in training]
[Knowles coaching players]
Gabriel Knowles (interview): “We’ve taken to having fans and misting fans in change rooms and on the benches, wet towels for the players as well. The drinks break is obviously a contentious new issue in the World Cup, but something that’s been quite normal here for us in the warmer months when we start and finish seasons. So that’s on one side. In advance of that is obviously using the different tools and technologies that are available for us to know what that heat risk looks like in advance and be able to plan accordingly, eg moving games from the hotter parts of the day into the cooler parts of the day.”
[Grant Lynch training with his teammates]
[Knowles with footballs]
[Football team during a training session]
[Lynch doing keepie uppies with a football]
[Lynch training with fellow researcher Philomena Colagiuri]
Grant Lynch (interview): “We have had to cancel a number of games because of the heat. Here in Australia, the competition is played over summer, or there’s a big part of the competition that’s played over summer. So, we have multiple games that have been cancelled because of the heat.”
[Lynch training with Colagiuri]
Grant Lynch (interview): “It helps in a few ways. I think the first way is that we take into account more than just temperature. So, we care about things like humidity and airflow and wind speed and the amount of solar radiation from the sun. These things are all important to be able to understand what the risk is for a football player. And then secondly, it gives some recommendations. So, some strategies that you can put in place to be able to help keep yourself cool.”
[Lynch training with Colagiuri]
Ollie Jay (interview): “The main reason that we’re concerned about the heat is that it can actually be deadly and a lot of people actually don’t realise that this is the case. It’s mercifully rare for people to get heat stroke and die of heat stroke, but it’s not uncommon for people to experience exertional heat illnesses and we call this heat exhaustion. And, so, there’s different levels of heat exhaustion from mild to severe heat exhaustion, and this is typified by symptoms such as nausea, vomiting, headaches and quite unpleasant experiences. So that’s something that we want to make sure that people are avoiding.”
[Jay using the Sports Heat Tool app]
Ollie Jay (interview): “The app itself includes 33 different sports, so you get a sport-specific heat risk score with a seven-day forecast with hourly data going into the future.”
[Jay using the Sports Heat Tool app]
Ollie Jay (interview): “The app itself includes 33 different sports, so you get a sport-specific heat risk score with a seven-day forecast with hourly data going into the future.”
[Lynch adjusting a mask on Colagiuri in a heat chamber]
[Colagiuri walking on a treadmill next to Jay in a heat chamber]
Ollie Jay (interview): “So, we can basically represent any type of climate that is present on planet Earth, not just now, but also in the future. So, we work with climate scientists to understand what the heat waves of the future are going to look like with different carbon emissions and simulate those different versions of the future right now and we can investigate what kind of impacts those different types of conditions are going to have on people when they’re trying to do activities like Philomena is doing right now, such as brisk walking on a hot summer day.”
[Colagiuri walking on a treadmill next to Jay in a heat chamber]
[Graph]
[Colaguiri on a treadmill]
[Colaguiri removing mask]
This script was provided by The Associated Press.