Luís Sénica | Sports Training

Luís Sénica

Masters in Sports Coaching

My name is Luís Sénica, and I am currently President of the Portuguese Skating Federation. I was a student in the first degree programme at Lusófona University. Later, I also completed my master’s degree here in high-performance training.

I taught skating and also rink hockey, specifically within some specialisations. The course is extremely important. I mentioned earlier in my talk that this is a house of dreams.

This is a place that opens paths, guides us, creates expectations, allows us to improve, and gives us the opportunity to fully invest in a specific discipline or sport we’re passionate about. So I believe it has tremendous potential for students. It’s a university with an excellent faculty.

It’s a university with a very strong programme in the area of master’s degrees. I speak especially from my experience with training, sports, and performance. And it is genuinely worth spending time here.

It leaves us with a very positive feeling. It equips us with tools that later give us skills and strengths for our professional activities. I believe the big advantage lies in our choice — because we want to stay connected to coaching, and we want to become coaches. That’s fundamental.

Each master’s degree has its own focus, its own area of work. Here, it is clearly training. Training and becoming a coach. I also mentioned something very important earlier. Being a coach is an unfinished process.

Regardless of everything, we have to keep preparing ourselves every day. And what we learn here at the university enables that preparation. It gives us the ability to research, to plan, to structure that planning, and to go back and plan again. I believe that is extremely important.

And that’s the real difference. It’s about wanting to be a coach, ultimately. It’s about wanting to work at a high-performance level. It’s about wanting to be in constant, I would say, constant confrontation with reality in order to overcome it. It’s a continuous process of developing skills. It’s a continuation of learning.

It’s a continuation of the development of scientific and technological tools that the master’s programme allows us to access. So there is a full range of strengths here. And I would also say that the master’s degree offers something very important for me in relation to the role.

As I also said earlier in my talk: here, since you have access to the best teachers, it’s important to listen to them. Listen to the best teachers, read the best books. And here, we have access to both of those worlds. This prepares us for real life, which is not easy.