The board welcomes Rebecca Longhurst – our 11th and newest enrolled specialist.

Rebecca is a Sports Physiotherapist from Tāmaki Makaurau. She is incredibly passionate about Sports Physiotherapy and working collaboratively in multidisciplinary environments to help athletes reach their goals. She strongly believes that health is a performance enabler, and that as physiotherapists we have so much to offer, not only in the more traditional role of exceptional injury management and rehabilitation, but also in the realms of injury risk mitigation and performance optimisation.

Rebecca graduated from AUT in 2001 with an under-graduate degree in Health Science (Physiotherapy). We returned to AUT to pursue her post graduate studies attaining, Post Graduate Diploma (Musculoskeletal Physiotherapy) in 2006, Masters of Health Practice (Western Acup) (First Class Honours) in 2007, and then completed a Masters thesis looking at the reliability of a pre-season movement screen in Netball players, attaining her Master of Philosophy in 2013.

Rebecca has worked extensively with both able bodied and para-athletes in a variety of sports. She worked for the Samoan Netball Team attending the 2006 Melbourne Commonwealth Games, before moving to Canada and working with the Canadian Para-Alpine ski team for 6 years attending both the 2010 Vancouver and 2014 Sochi Winter Paralympic Games. She returned to Aotearoa New Zealand in 2011 and began working with High Performance Sport New Zealand in 2014 attending the 2014 Glasgow Commonwealth Games and the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympic Games with the New Zealand Olympic Committee.

Rebecca worked on the Sport and Exercise New Zealand (SEPNZ) Executive Committee from 2016-2021, chairing the Education Committee. Alongside the Education Committee she oversaw the Completion of the SEPNZ Certificate in Sport and Exercise Physiotherapy. She also was involved in consultation for the new AUT Sports Physiotherapy paper that will start in 2022.

Rebecca currently works 30 hours a week at High Performance Sport New Zealand, as she balances work with life at home with her two young children. Rebecca is extremely excited to grow her role as a Specialist Physiotherapist aiming to help other Sports Physiotherapists in New Zealand to optimise outcomes for the people they are working with.