Among the alumni of Hebei Sport University are Olympic champions Cai Yalin, Su Huijuan, Pang Wei, Chang Yuan and Long Daoyi, plus a world champion in football, national-team players in table tennis and basketball, and the Asian record holder in the women’s shot put. The school behind this roster is the province’s only independent sports university.
Shooting is a particular specialty. In 2022 the university set up a shooting academy with the Hebei shooting and archery center, the first such academy in China, and the following year joined the national shooting association and the provincial sports bureau to co-found the China Shooting College on that base.
The school was approved by the provincial government in 1984 on the foundation of the physical education department of Hebei Normal College, formally established by the State Education Commission in 1985, and absorbed the Hebei provincial sports school in 2005. It operates under the provincial sports bureau.
Seventeen undergraduate programs cover sports education, sports training, martial arts and traditional sports, exercise science, ice and snow sports, and football, among others. Sports training and wushu are national specialty programs, and martial arts and traditional sports hold national first-class program status. All four sub-disciplines of sports science are rated key disciplines at provincial level.
Two wings set the school apart. Its ice-and-snow sports department, created in 2015, now runs the country’s largest ice-snow talent program, and 476 staff and students served the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing across all three competition zones. In golf, a management track started in 2003 has placed graduates across more than 80 percent of China’s golf courses.
In four decades the university has produced more than 50,000 graduates, spread across schools, sports teams and fitness clubs, from campuses of roughly 700 mu by the Hutuo River in Shijiazhuang and beside the provincial Olympic sports center in Zhengding.
Data Source: HEPEC Official Website (as of 2024)
