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
- Compliment and reinforce youngsters on their effort and results.
- Try to consider the youngsters’ developmental rhythm and respect trainability; be patient and postpone the introduction of new skills training tasks in the training process until the previous stages are processed;adjust and accelerate when they are ready to move to the next training challenges.
- Create a good balance between challenging tasks and success experiences.
Actions for clubs
- Recruit young people, currently active in sports club, as instructors or assisting coaches. Sometimes paid, sometimes on volunteer basis.
- By giving youngsters an active role both in the training process and in social intervention, they can become role models for others. Reinforce the focus on the youngsters’ individual talent.
- Provide to youngsters opportunities to collaborate in activities, games and events organization, giving them responsibilities and specific goals to achieve.
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’.