Brooks McNiven is a teacher in the West Vancouver School District where he currently serves as the head coach of the West Vancouver Baseball Academy. He has coached at high-performance high school tournaments hosted by Baseball Canada and the Toronto Blue Jays. He is also the owner and Director of Inside Performance, an indoor baseball training centre; and has participated in the 2008 Beijing Olympics as a member of the Canadian Men’s Baseball team. He hopes to have the opportunity to coach with the Junior National team in the coming years.
While seeking a master’s program where he could focus his studies on sports performance and athletic development, Brooks states “this was the perfect fit for me with my sporting background and passion for high performance sports. Now that I have completed the program it has certainly furthered my teaching career. I feel that the master’s program has pushed me to be more innovative and to work through roadblocks in an attempt to develop best practice techniques in the sport. The Master’s program totally shifted my coaching away from some of the traditional methods to an evidence-based approach.”
With regard to the online experience Brook states that, “it made completing a master’s program while working a fulltime job and coaching very manageable.” His final research project focused on investigating “workload management with adolescent baseball players” to understand the “significant increase in injuries to pitchers at all levels of baseball.”
