The Doctoral Programme in Sport Sciences of UCAM has experienced a great international reach with a 30% increase, during the last two years, in the number of researchers from outside Spain who chose this university for its research dimension in the field of sports.

One of these doctoral students is Adam Petway, current director of athletic performance of the Washington Wizards, an NBA reference team, who previously worked for the Philadelphia 76ers as physical trainer.

He decided to develop his doctoral thesis with UCAM after discovering the research work that is carried out at the Research Centre on High Performance Sport (CIARD) with different professional clubs and high-level athletes. Now he his writing, in the U.S. capital, his doctoral thesis on training and competition load control in professional basketball (NBA), and he has already published various works on international scientific journals.

Pedro Emilio Alcaraz (director of CIARD-UCAM) and Julio Calleja (University of the Basque Country) are the supervisors of this thesis, which aims at improving the performance and at preventing injuries among NBA basketball players. Previously, the thesis was supervised by Tomás T. Freitas, a researcher of the Centre on High Performance in Sport of UCAM. Freitas’ work led to a large number of publications on journals with a big international impact, thanks to the collaboration of CIARD with UCAM Murcia CB, of the Endesa League, and to the possibility to collect data from it.