Every youngster should receive positive reinforcement from significant others (i.e. coaches, peers, parents) when he/she works hard and they should help others to learn through cooperation. It should be recognised that every person’s contribution is important for the club.
Working actions
Actions for coaches/trainers
- Create a social and fun environment in a sports climate, which promote skills and abilities development, learning opportunities and reinforce team spirit.
- Treat everybody equal and promote equity.
- Fairly balance the amount of time during the game for each player, avoiding the exclusion based on the skills level –> everyone contributes.
Actions for clubs
- Provide coaches with an educational seminar and sample practical sessions on how to assist changing coaching styles and the behaviour of the youngsters.
- Create an award to recognize the ones that most contributed to create a positive practice climate. Take care the reward goes to different youngsters, in role (e.g. “player of the week”, “team of the month”).
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’.