Ben Lucas, Associate Director of Commercial Services
Ben in responsible for a portfolio of services and facilities across the University including Sport Swansea and Swansea Bay Sports Park. Ben leads on creation and development of the overarching strategy for student sport including advocacy, stakeholder engagement and the management of key partnerships and commercial opportunities. Ben has a long history with Swansea University, having started studying here as an undergraduate in 2000. He then worked in the Students’ Union, before retuning in 2011 to take up a role with the University. Ben spends his weekends and holidays exploring the wilder parts of Wales and beyond.
James Mountain, Strategic Sport Manager
James manages the University’s sport and physical activity offering and is responsible for delivering on our sport strategy, leading the management team, driving up participation and performance across all of our sport and physical activity programmes, and leading on developing partnerships with key stakeholders. James has a background in managing sport in Higher Education and within National Governing Bodies and is passionate about improving lives through sport and physical activity. James is a keen sports person and spends much of his spare time taking part in adrenaline and team sports.
Shana Thomas, Engage Programme Manager
Shana manages Get ACTIVE, which aims to increase physical activity levels of University students and staff by engaging them in activities on and off campus. With an MSc in Physical Activity and Public Health, Shana has worked in sport, physical activity and health for over 20 years, having started as a Physical Activity Specialist at Swansea Public Health Team. She then spent 14 years as a Senior Officer at Sport Wales where she managed a number of relationships with local authority sports development teams, led on the development of BME sport in Wales, as well as health-based initiatives with Health Boards, Public Health Wales and mental health organisations. Shana is passionate about physical activity for wellbeing and all things cricket, playing and volunteering at her local club, and loves to spend time walking and climbing in the mountains with her family.
Sadie Mellalieu, Student Sport Manager
Sadie manages the ‘Aspire’ strand of our sport strategy and is responsible for the delivery of the University’s recreational and competitive sport offering. This currently includes 56 sports clubs and an increasing number of intramural programmes.
Sadie is a keen hockey player and has recently represented Wales in the Over 35’s Masters Hockey World Cup.
Verity Cook, Athlete Support Officer
Verity supports the continued development of an outstanding performance sport environment, focusing, in particular, on the development and implementation of our sports scholarship programmes. Verity also provides performance lifestyle services to athletes and leads the development of the TASS programme. Verity supports high performance and talented athletes, as well as the high performance sports, promoting wellbeing across the sporting environments. A qualified performance lifestyle advisor, Verity has extensive experience at Welsh Triathlon and Swim Wales. In her spare time she enjoys traveling, swimming, running and climbing.
