ABSTRACT
The disciplinary relationship between history and sport studies is a fascinating one. In the UK, most sport studies and sport science undergraduate degree courses have a historical element to them. Students who choose to take multidisciplinary sport degrees are always likely to have strengths and weaknesses, and historians need to acknowledge that many of them will be primarily scientific in their approach. Historians need to find out the sporting interests of students, use analogies between science and history that will work for them, and encourage them to see their degree as a learning process rather than as a system of information delivery. The most persistent and most dispiriting aspects of the job have always come from some other people's perceptions of what sport studies involves. History has a great deal to offer to the academic project that is sport studies, and it can be of inestimable benefit personal, intellectual, vocational to sport students.
