St Mary's Graduate Assistant to Work with England Women's Team at the 2015 Football World Cup

Graduate Assistant at St Mary’s University, Twickenham Tom Shanks has been select to be part of the England support team at this summer’s FIFA Women’s World Cup in Canada. Throughout the World Cup, Tom will be based at St George’s Park, the home of English Football, to supply performance analysis support to the squad. Tom is part of a team of four interim analysts selected for the tournament. The team also includes St Mary’s alumnus Ben Wakefield, who now heads up the analysis at Queens Park Rangers FC’s academy. Tom, who works on the BA Physical and Sport Education (PSE) programme at St Mary’s, also recently worked with the England Women’s U15 squad during a training and international fixture camp. The England squad are in Group F alongside France, Mexico & Columbia and played their first match against France on the 9^th June in Moncton. Tom said, “Its an amazing opportunity for me to work with and help the England team for the World Cup, I am excited to work with and learn from some of the best analysts the country has to offer. Hopefully the team will succeed and the experience I gain from this will help benefit the PSE programme too. “It will be great to work with Ben again, from the training we have done it is clear that there will be a lot of hard work involved but you would not expect anything less at this level. It will be a fantastic experience and hopefully I can share it with our students when teaching starts again.”