RANGERS’ Academy Medical Services Manager, Olivier Materne, is preparing to present at an International Olympic Committee World Conference next week.
The conference will focus on the prevention of injury and illness in sport as speakers from across the world gather for three-days from November 25 until November 27.
Held in Monaco, the event is the premier and biggest international conference for those interested in clinical aspects of sports and exercise medicine.
Olivier will present twice, firstly on the survival analysis of lower-limb injuries in youth elite football, before another focusing on attacking injuries from an epidemiological and clinical perspective in youth elite football.
Speaking ahead of the conference, he said: “I am really looking forward to it, the conference is big but sports medicine is quite a small world. It is always the same people that you meet and it has almost been two years without an international conference in our area - this is the first big one after Coronavirus.
“I'm not only looking forward to the presentations because it is a fantastic conference, but to meet some people again face-to-face. I have a couple of meetings organised to discuss potential projects or ideas and to share things because that is what it is all about, sharing ideas and being together.
Over his two presentations Olivier will cover how growth and skeletal maturation can impact young footballers, as well as how to deal with growth-related injuries.
He continued: “My first presentation will provide some figures on some research work I have done. There are some players who can be advanced in their skeletal maturation and some players can be late and there's data on how their growth impacts the type of injuries.
“My second presentation is a workshop, it is more practical and it is split into two parts. The first part is also based around the injury surveillance system and the recording of injury within an Academy environment. You may have a big team of physiotherapists but you have to make sure that they are all recording in the same way to have a proper data set.
“The second part is related to the clinical aspect and discusses how to reduce the risk of pitfalls or misdiagnosing injuries in young players by considering the growth plate specificities.
“The system must match the environment, so here at Rangers it is customised and other clubs may need to tweak that based on the number of staff and many other factors which need to be considered.
“From a young age players are involved in training and the training then becomes more structured and organised. As the volume of training and games increase, it is good because they need to play to develop but this evolution has become more professional and it is the same for medicine, we also need to develop the proper tools to track adequately the impact of this evolution on injuries.
“The idea is that, in youth football, the injuries evolve with the football development evolution, the trend of the injuries today are different than 15 years ago.”