It’s home to nearly 400 of our top athletes. Check out the new headquarters for the South Australian Sports Institute – complete with an indoor running track, environmental chamber and movement studio.
Just on the outskirts of the Adelaide CBD, the new $88 million state-of-the-art SASI base sits next to our Mile End athletics and netball stadiums and Australian Centre for Sports Aerodynamics, its modern architecture featuring curved glass, metal and wood.
Opening its doors to athletes in October, the space is a hive of activity for SA’s best and brightest sports talent.
On The Post’s visit to the facility, we spy marathon runner Jess Stenson, Paralympic gold medal winners Jed Altschwager and Nikki Ayers, along with some of SA’s up-and-coming volleyballers and basketballers.
SASI Director Keren Faulkner welcomes us to the new facility, explaining it will be used by almost 400 elite athletes each year.
“We have about 180 scholarship holders. They’re athletes preparing for Olympic, Paralympic and Commonwealth Games,” she says.
“And on top of that, we have about another 200 or so athletes that come in and use our facilities, and they’re ranging from development athletes in partner sports like Athletics South Australia, right through to the Adelaide Thunderbirds.”
The building, a joint venture between the state government ($68 million) and UniSA ($20 million), will also accommodate the university’s sports science students, with high performance laboratories and teaching spaces, as well as the team from the Office for Recreation, Sport and Racing.
Inside the new gym
Keren takes us into the new strength and conditioning gym, which looks a fair bit fancier than your local Goodlife! It’s light and airy and packed with exercise equipment, as well as a five-lane synthetic turf running track.
“We often associate a gym with weights and weight training, but our athletes in here do a whole lot more than that,” Keren explains.
“So we have our 60m indoor running track (where) we do things like running training and running rehabilitation. They do lots of dynamic training with equipment like medicine balls and hurdles and ropes.”
There are also rowing machines, plyometric boxes and even an anti-gravity treadmill.
“We have some great technology where they can film their lifting and then watch it on a screen for feedback. They can get a whole lot more data about the way that they are doing their training session.”
Pushing athletes to the limit
Next up is the environmental chamber. As Keren concedes, it looks “a bit like an empty room” – essentially a glass box – but its function is far more impressive than its appearance. It’s a space where conditions can be altered on demand, and equipment moved in and out to create specific training environments.
“Athletes can train in here, say on an exercise bike or a rowing ergometer, and we can set the relative temperature and humidity and even oxygen concentration. So we can have them training at a relative altitude,” she says.
It’s particularly handy if athletes want to replicate an environment they’re going to compete in overseas. And it can also be used to boost fitness, where the physiology team designs a training program and climate conditions that give an athlete some overload, and then monitors their body’s reaction.
World-class courtside action
Not only does the new SASI hub fit a full-sized indoor sprung timber court, but also a half-court movement studio. Both spaces are designed for “world-class” instant performance analysis, with cameras set up to capture every angle of an individual or team’s play.
“What they can do is replay a play or track players on court, so that we can show that up on the big screen, and we can give coaches and athletes feedback that’s in real time,” Keren says.
The importance of recovery
The mottled green tiles in this room are reminiscent of a luxury resort, but the space’s two pools and saunas – specially built to also allow access for athletes with mobility impairments – play a vital role in all training programs.
Athletes can alternate between the hot and cold plunge pools to “stimulate circulation and stimulate recovery”, Keren explains.
“One of the training sessions I’ve seen our athletes use is to do their normal gym session, followed by a session in the sauna. And what that does is it keeps their heart rate up and their physiological response going for a longer period of time in total, and that can help with fitness, and it can help them to prepare for a hot environment if they’re traveling to an event overseas somewhere.”
Kitchen connection: The athlete hub
Our final stop is the athlete recovery zone. In their downtime, athletes also have a space to sit, study, chat – and cook together.
Keren says it’s a great place for interaction and education. She’s witnessed athletes swapping smoothie recipes, or teams coming together to cook a steak after a gruelling training session.
“Our athletes love to cook, and so we’ve set this area up so that they can do group cooking classes, or they can just share a meal together,” Keren explains.
“And you can tell that our kitchen is really new because it’s pretty tidy!”
What does all of this mean?
Keren says SASI’s new home is something they’re “extremely proud of”, and it will play a vital role in helping athletes prepare for upcoming competitions, particularly the Brisbane 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games.
“(It’s) where we will help athletes develop into the best version of themselves, both in their sporting pursuits and in their everyday lives,” she says.
“It will also enable our coaches and staff to power greatness in their work.
“We’ve always had a world-class team, and now we have the facilities to match this – the sky’s the limit in terms of what we can achieve.”
