HARPER PERFORMANCE CIC is an SEUK certified non-profit social enterprise providing performance-support services and consultancy to aspirational athletes, teams and sports organisations across the world.
We exist to fiercely champion the underdog, specialising in the provision of relevant, accessible, sustainable and locally-driven performance support to athletes and organisations hamstrung by logistical, economic and sociocultural barriers to sporting excellence.
Harper Performance was founded in 2015 by the performance-support practitioner; Tim Harper following over a decade working in elite sport in the UK and overseas. Tim had grown frustrated with the lack of performance-support available to vast swathes of talented athletes and the calm acceptance that athletes from large, rich countries enjoy benefits not available to those from poorer, smaller countries and regions. Tim rewrote his mission statement to make better use of his skills, of his experience and of his professional training and set about working with people and organisations that harboured all the talent and all the GRIT, but none of the performance support that they need to realise their true athletic and sporting potential.
This became the mission statement of Harper Performance and with the help of like-minded practitioners and a genuinely world-class 'Advisory Board', a small group of sports scientists, strength & conditioning coaches, and sports medicine practitioners started pursuing opportunities to work with athletes and teams from all sports and disciplines with genuine aspirations to reach the top but who are hamstrung by logistical, financial and sociocultural barriers to performance.
HARPER PERFORMANCE was born, and with social enterprise certification awarded in August 2016 by SEUK, incorporation as a 'community interest company' in early-2018 and an ever-growing collection of clients and projects all over the world, things have snowballed from there!
We believe that your background, financial circumstances or level of privilege should have no bearing on your access to elite performance-support to help you realise your ambitions in sport. Utilising some of the most experienced, most qualified practitioners in elite sport, our multi-disciplinary Projects team work collaboratively with athletes, teams and organisations from disadvantaged communities to deliver highly relevant, accessible, sustainable, and locally-driven mechanisms to optimise athletic and sporting performance.
Mimicking resource-rich performance-support programmes isn't feasible nor sustainable for athletes, teams and organisations facing adversity and disadvantage. We believe that by working in collaboration with our client from design to delivery, and beyond - by understanding the obstacles they face in real depth, we're able to develop more culturally aware, relevant and above-all else, locally driven performance-support provisions that are sustainable long after we go home.
Maintaining the athletes, teams or organisations cultural-DNA in any performance-support programme is integral to its long-term impact. Our priority is for our clients to maintain complete ownership of their performance-support provisions, utilising the high performance expertise of the HP team where necessary to generate their 'own way' to compete with the very best whilst ensuring accessibility, relevance and sustainability.
Further, we ensure that our programmes are regenerative by design through upskilling, coach-education and ongoing distance learning for both athlete and practitioner, ensuring the long-term effectiveness of any programme can be supported locally rather than by a perennial reliance on external expertise.
