Faith Dooley, Concordia’s head volleyball coach, had her research on strength in children and adolescents published in Sports Medicine.
Dooley began collecting the data for her master's thesis in October 2018, before she even started graduate school at the University of North Dakota. She says she needed the early start since it was such a large project. Dooley and another researcher completed the main research and split the different strength test measures up into different studies that were done independently.
“I completed my thesis and once I submitted it to the school, I began working with the other authors (professionals in the field) to sharpen and finetune my paper,” Dooley said. “They had some good insight being so knowledgeable in the field.”
Dooley’s paper, “A Systematic Analysis of Temporal Trends in the Handgrip Strength of 2,216,320 Children and Adolescents Between 1967 and 2017,” explored a question that Dooley herself began thinking about as she worked with high school teams doing strength and conditioning during the summer months while she was in college.
“I remember watching, thinking that the high school kids I worked with didn’t seem to have posture as good as or be as strong as when I was that age,” she said. “So, this is where the question arose – ‘Are kids stronger or weaker today?’”
Dr. Grant Tomkinson, professor in education, health and behavior studies at UND, said, “Faith’s study, informed by a systemic review process, brought together one of the largest datasets on handgrip strength (HGS) ever assembled in order to estimate international and national temporal trends in children and adolescents.”
Once Dooley began researching, she started to find that handgrip strength was a great measure of overall strength with little variability in the test. She also found that strength is linked to health.
What she didn’t expect to find was that the strength measure went up.
“By systematically analyzing data from 2.2 million children and adolescents aged 9-17 years from 19 countries since 1967, Dooley estimated that HGS has improved substantially by about 20%. Because HGS is significantly associated with current and future health, trends in HGS are suggestive of corresponding trends in population health,”
“It is hard to say why strength has gone up,” Dooley said. “In my study, I only suggested why it possibly could have gone up. I think it will be interesting to see if future research looks more into the causes.”
Dooley grew up on a farm just west of the Casselton area and went to school at Central Cass, where she learned to love sports and the strength and conditioning/personal training world. She played volleyball, basketball, and ran track throughout high school and played volleyball for four years at UND and basketball while working on her master’s. As school was nearing an end, she was looking for something in personal training when the volleyball position at Concordia opened up. It ended up being a perfect fit because she’s also an assistant strength and conditioning coach for Concordia.
Dooley’s accomplishment is a plus for the Athletics department, where a well-rounded coach is appreciated.
“Coaches positively influence student-athletes in so many ways, and Faith’s research and subsequent publication demonstrates her commitment to personal growth and education, which makes me incredibly proud of her and sets a terrific example for the volleyball team and our entire department,” said Athletic Director Rachel Bergeson.
“I absolutely love my job,” Dooley said. “I love getting to see young adults grow as people and see them work together to accomplish goals.”
Although she has no plans for future research, Dooley plans to assist with the additional studies that look at the other testing measures that were found early during data collection for her research. She said she thinks it will be interesting to see where the world takes this research and applies it.