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Teenage cricketers who are prone to back injuries may one day thank Helen Crewe for their preventive training techniques.

Helen, who is part way through her PhD in biomechanics at the School of Sport Science, Exercise and Health, has just won the field’s wealthiest and most prestigious Young Investigators Award for her work in the area of back injuries among young fast bowlers.

Helen won the award, worth $5,000, at the European College of Sports Science (ECSS) congress, held in July in Liverpool. She is the first person from an Australian university to win the award at the conference, which has been held annually for 16 years.

Helen was working in the prevention and rehabilitation of sporting injuries, including those of young cricketers, in her hometown of Johannesburg. “I came to UWA from South Africa to do my PhD here because it is one of the top places in the world to study sport science,” she said.

“And being involved in cricket, of course I knew about Bruce Elliott and the work he has done with international cricketers.”

Helen’s PhD is jointly supervised by Winthrop Professor Elliott, Associate Professor Jacqueline Alderson and Dr Amity Campbell from Curtin University.

“Winning this award at the world’s biggest sport science conference is fantastic for all of us,” Professor Elliott said. “The ECSS has about 2,500 delegates and there are typically about 350 nominations for the award from all over the world. Four judges decide the winner.”

Winthrop Professor Danny Green, who divides his time between UWA’s School of Sport Science, Exercise and Health and John Moores University in Liverpool, was one of those four judges this year.

Dr Toni Tinken, a PhD graduate of Professor Green’s, won the award in 2008. But she was one of his Liverpool students. Helen is the first winner for Australia.

Professor Alderson said Helen won the award because her research was the right mix of theory and application. “It was also novel, original and very well presented,” she said.

Helen, a gymnast when she was younger, was concerned at the number of back injuries she was seeing among cricketers aged 14 to 18.

“That age group has the highest incidence of stress fracture of the lumbar spine and I want to help prevent it,” she said. “But first we need to better understand the injury mechanism.”

Her work is looking at the loading of the lumbar spine in relation to muscle asymmetry found in a lot of fast bowlers.
“Their muscle development is one-sided because of their bowling technique. Fast bowlers tend to bend towards one side during bowling. The muscles on the other side are trying to control this movement which is why imbalance will often occur," said Helen.

“Injuries are also a result of that load. But nobody had measured the forces, or loading, at the lumbar spine in junior bowlers.”

Helen followed a group of young WACA bowlers through the cricket season, using magnetic resonance imaging to see the changes in their lumbar muscle symmetry.

“If we can find a link with bowling technique, muscle asymmetry and injury, we will be able to make recommendations to coaches,” she said.

“We won’t have answered all the questions by the time I finish my research but I hope we will have taken the question a lot further. And of course, there remains the mystery of the bowler who has perfect technique but still gets injured.”

Cricket Australia sponsored Helen’s research, making the cricketers available and funding the MRI scans. The Faculty of Life and Physical Sciences is supporting Helen to travel to Japan soon to re-present her award-winning paper.