Kääriku Sports Centre to become the centre of Eastern European sports innovation

On 11 October, the meeting of the Investment Advisory Board of Kääriku Sports Centre formed an opinion that the Kääriku sports complex should become a unique smart centre of the future for the entire region, which provides innovative solutions from trainings to sports medicine.

“Building and completing the Kääriku Sports Centre has been set up as one of the priorities of the Government of the Republic, but in the modern information age, a centre must also offer increasingly more innovative solutions and services. As a smart centre of the future, our goal is to perform the full-cycle monitoring of sports camps with our equipment, and this will contribute to all athletes, clubs, and more widely, to sports sciences, sports medicine, and why not also start-ups who start developing the equipment of the future,” said Kristjan Karis, member of the board of SA Tehvandi Sports Centre.

According to Karis, the centre will create unique opportunities for the solution of an important hub in which knowledge obtained in lecture rooms and labs are taken through implementation activities to athletes and coaches and, based on the accumulated volumes of data, new knowledge is created.

Head of the University of Tartu Institute of Sports Sciences and Physiotherapy Priit Kaasik says that the future development for the Kääriku centre will give a new impetus to sports sciences. “In the long term the work of the researchers of the University and other research institutions enables to create connections from the obtained volume of data and provide inputs into Estonian sports as a whole. Kääriku with its future infrastructure and contents would be an ideal place for testing new solutions and a starting place, which would also raise the preparation levels of Estonian Olympic athletes in anticipation of the next Olympic Games.”

Rein Kuik, Head of the Sports Medicine and Rehabilitation Clinic of the University of Tartu Hospital, who was invited as a guest to the investment advisory board, has earlier also given advice on preparing the conceptual design plans for sports medicine rooms of the centre. “Today we are not only talking about the sports-medical monitoring of athletes and active people. As a smart centre, we have to pay increasingly more attention in Estonia to the prevention and therapy of sports injuries of our athletes. The latter does not only involve where we train, but also how we do it. Therefore, it is necessary to create facilities at Kääriku to conduct different health surveys and procedures,” Rein Kuik added.

Since 2012 the Kääriku Sports Centre, owned by the University of Tartu, has been managed by SA Tehvandi Sports Centre. The aim of the transfer of management is to develop the complex into a modern training centre and a preparation centre for athletes belonging to the Estonian national team. The final completion of the Kääriku Sports Centre is planned for the year 2020.

The investment advisory board of the Kääriku Sports Centre was convened in 2012 to advise on the development activities of the sports centre. The advisory board includes representatives of SA Tehvandi Sports Centre, the University of Tartu and the Estonian Olympic Committee, two members from each.

Additional information:

Kristjan Karis, Board Member of SA Tehvandi Sports Centre, 517 4766, kristjan@tehvandi.ee
Priit Kaasik, Head of the University of Tartu Institute of Sports Sciences and Physiotherapy, 517 7696, priit.kaasik@ut.ee