Sportegy: sport as strategic tool for personal development

The project was based around the idea of development. That included the development of the youth involved, the organisations, the teams, moreover the development of the sport and the possibility to adapt new training modules in the national context of the countries involved. The project implementation went according to plan, with a couple issues that had to be resolved on the spot. The project cycle in terms of activities started with the Kick-off meeting in Brussels, Belgium attended by the coordinator - Mr. Ustamitev. The networking and sharing event was a positive aspect to our network, as we managed to make contacts and spread information about what we intended to do in the upcoming activities.Following we started the phase of actively preparing our activities, we were engaged in networking events and had to attend also to a series of events in the context of our club and a couple of big championships (internal and domestic). In May members of our team were invited to a conference in Germany with our partners and a domestic lecturer. The event topic was relevant to the sport development of the youth sector and we managed to establish contacts and promote Erasmus+ as a possibility for sectoral development to the biggest clubs and organisations in racket sports in Germany.After the event in Germany we were back on keeping up with the events and the schedule in the project management plan - planning, preparing, analyzing information, keeping in touch with out partners and opening discussion sessions with our youth leaders and athletes. What we learned from the kick-off meeting and the event in Germany - in terms of development strategies, other good practices and p2p connections, we tried to implement in the project. The development of the activities in the implementation phase was enriched through those two events and the outputs aimed towards the youth improved greatly. The first transnational event was planned to take place in Bulgaria and the three clubs were represented. In that event we introduced a pilot version of the methodology, that was developed in the previous months. It was an important moment for us, a the online meetings with our partners finally became "live". Regarding the events that took place we did a comparative study of training curricula, brainstorming and collection of good practices between us and also had a discussion about how to make the final version of the methodology more evidence-based. When we implemented the pilot version with the youth athletes, workers and representatives we gathered feedback from everyone and created a lot of ideas to further develop the methodology.Following the event we engaged in research in our desire to further develop the methodology and we had an innovative aspect of involving statistics as a "proof-basis" for the need of the methodology. There were a couple of weeks between this event and the next TNM so we started the online communication once again and managed to further improve the methodology based on the feedback.The next event was a Training course in Germany, where we put the focus on developing the members from the club - youth athletes, team leaders, etc. The end result was to train our "Sportegy ambassadors" so they can promote, understand and further develop in their line of work the methodology. What was really important for us was to help the "ambassadors" understand the key differences (underlined in the methodology), from where they stem (again, as statistically shown in the methodology report) and, most importantly, that they can be changed with the proper actions. In term of the the actual curriculum it was based mainly on NFE and informal learning, as well as some training methods were implemented for the joint activities - sports + learning. The rest of the activities in our project were more or less planned and went on as expected with minor difficulties.