Every youngster should experience a certain freedom of choice in his/her actions, thinking, and feeling related to his/her sports practice. Every youngster can take initiative and should experience their behaviour as self-organized.
Working actions
Actions for coaches/trainers
- Encourage youngsters right after the training to tell which parts they liked most and why. Use the appropriate feedback in the next trainings. Discussing goals and strategies with youngsters is helpful. Listen to participants voice, encourage youngsters to ask questions during training.
- Start the training with a short warm-up, during which let the youngsters choose and play their own games. Ask them to have different roles, referee, timekeeper, coach, let them express their choices.
- Ask youngsters how his/her perfect sport season would look like and support him in achieving it.
Actions for clubs
- Create a youth committee, to participate in club decisions. Sharing leadership and decision-making with youngsters is sharing on the rewards of sport.
- Allow youngsters to provide their input by creating a positive and constructive dialogue, which stimulate pro-activity and different initiatives, provide new choices and challenges and encourage responsibility and autonomy.
- Give youngsters an active role in recruiting and organizing the participation of newcomers.
Tools
Card Games Keep Youngsters Involved
The most important tool in the toolkit are the card games, developed for the Erasmus+ Sport project Keep Youngsters Involved.
These card games help you to get to know more about how to implement actions in the sport club to keep youngsters (12-19 year) involved and prevent them from dropout.
The different card games can help professionals who work with youngsters in sport, young adults and sport clubs how to improve their policy on youth, and help by creating a sport club action plan.
Cards
In total there are 169 action cards. For every factor you can choose a variety of cards. You can choose the cards and print* them in colour to be able to use them. Cut them out and they are ready to be used.
* best printer settings: choose page sizing ‘fit’
Card Games
There are 3 different cards games:
- Card game 1: Choose your cards
- Card game 2: Roleplay Keep Youngsters Involved
- Card game 3: Go Fish
Download the toolkit with card games
Quick scan Y-score for sports clubs
How youth-oriented is your sports club? In other words, is your club accessible and attractive to young members? Does the club give enough consideration to the wishes, needs and possibilities of the various groups of young people? And especially, how can this be improved?
The Y-score answers these questions. It is an instrument that quickly and easily gives insight into how youth-oriented your club is. It helps you to look at your club through a young person’s ‘pair of glasses’.
Download the Quick scan Y-score for sport clubs
Participation ladder
How can you stimulate young people to actively participate in sports? How much responsibility can you give them? Isn’t it a lot of work to supervise them? How do you approach this and what are the results? These are questions that many clubs face. The ‘Young People’s Participation in Sports Ladder’ can help to give insight into the extent to which a club actively involves young people. Use the ladder to see where you now stand and where you want to go. Be inspired by the practical examples included and make a plan of action for your club.