Background
The School of Physical Education was materialized due to the need of professionals in sports management.
During the 70s and 80s, sports organization was commonly improvised in Nuevo Leon. At best, physical education teachers and professors used to participate in sports promotion, management, organization, development, and training.
In some reasonable cases, the responsibility of the sports area was assigned to professionals from other fields who, based on scientific theories or systems of their specialties, could consistently in sports subjects.
Several former amateur and professional athletes were appointed to sports management positions, who responded correctly in some cases and, in others, were outweighed by the prevailing systems. Moreover, different responsibilities were often assigned to people who had no relation to sports, which strictly required professionals.
This problem was noticed by Ing. Cayetano E. Garza Garza during his first years as a UANL football player and was later confirmed with his experiences in the campus and as head coach of the major team.
That was how Cayetano Garza had the idea to establish a school that would educate professionals who would be prepared not only in physical education, but also in sports organization, with skills for teaching physical education, sports training, and health subjects. Garza Garza was endorsed by former UANL President Dr. Luis E. Todd.
Once the undergraduate program was approved by the University Senate on August 7, 1974, the school opened its doors in the semester from September 1974 to February 1975, with 104 students and eleven professors for the day and night shifts in a makeshift classroom on the tenth floor of the Central Administration Offices.
The initial curriculum was strengthened with subjects from technical, medical, administrative, and social areas, allowing to educate qualified professionals for managing sports clubs as well as municipal, national and international sports offices.
Furthermore, graduates of this program had solid foundations to practice as teachers, professors, sports coaches, physical trainers, recreators, referees, and other job opportunities as sports journalists, professionals in sports marketing, and managers of athletes and business owners.
Originally, the institution began as a small school of physical education but it became a consolidated school on December 8, 1983. The master’s degree in Exercise Sciences was established on March 20, 1991.
After accomplishing its mission of educating professional sports organizers, the undergraduate degree changed to Bachelor of Exercise Sciences on June 1st, 1999, with its first class starting in the semester from August 2000 to January 2001.
In 2003, the building on the southeast side was inaugurated. During the semesters of August-December 2006 and the two of 2007, the old building and the Gemelos Gymnasium, which had housed the school since 1977, were demolished.
On January 18, 2010, our current building was inaugurated by State Governor Rodrigo Medina de la Cruz and former UANL Presidents Jesus Ancer Rodriguez and Jose Antonio Gonzalez Treviño.
Nowadays the school, with its teaching-administrative bodies, the institutional support of our university and its executives, and the strength of its graduates, and in compliance with the quality policies and the 2020 Vision, decisively faces the new challenges of the dynamic world of modern sports.