SKATE+

Skate plus (born from a previous experience –SKATE-) is a project for the inclusion of children in roller sports (in particular roller hockey) and for improvement if the clubs’ environment, through the creation of an exchanging sport community able to learn one from each other based on experiences and capacities developed in the years. The project reinforced and enlarged the network already set up during the first Project, a European network that seems to be able to further growth in the future: the participating coaches collaborated and exchanged in a mature and professional way, allowing Clubs’ improvement and facilitating a new perspective that turned out to be useful also during the Covid outbreak. Even if the most important activity of the project was the children inclusion in skating / roller hockey (and in sport in general) and the improvement of coaches’ teaching capacities, its implementation represented for all the participating partner much more than this in terms of openness beyond the own context and learning form the others. The project set up a technical working group whose participants (the Club coaches) share and exchange experiences and knowledge. This was possible thanks to the “differentiated” competences and background within partnership. In particular, one of the Spanish Partner (the Spanish Federation, RFEP) assumed a technical leadership thanks to its coaches’ long experience and propensity to systematise experiences and results, guiding all the other Partners (Clubs) towards results. Thanks to this guiding role, and their continuous presence among the different Partners, partnership built a method to adopt in teaching roller and evaluating progress and results. The participating Clubs exploited this opportunity to grow and to learn from the high skills made available by the Spanish Federation. The project identified and implemented a common method to deliver skating / roller hockey basis among children and a common approach to measure capacities, improving quality and upholding standards.Thanks to these exchanges among coaches and managers, the participating Clubs elaborated two technical outputs: 1. a set of initial and medium level skating / roller hockey lessons, a kind of guidelines that contains details of each class to be delivered in a second year skating / roller hockey course (8/9-month training). NB. The initial guidelines were elaborated during the first project. The Guidelines includes all the necessary explanations on how to teach each exercise. This document includes the photos taken during the training sessions in each Club. 2. a set of indicators aim at measuring skills achieved by children. Both documents are available in the Results platform of the project. Both outputs were tested in the project contexts and represent the result of a common and joint work among coaches.Additionally, a sort of “Skating / roller hockey Library” was built with the documents and experiences collected by Partners under the Working Groups planning which are conserved in the Skate platform (www.cpgrosseto.it).Thank to this project, the Clubs have activated a campaign to get children closer to sport. Many activities have been organised: “skating / roller hockey and school”, campus, tournaments, etc. Many volunteers were involved in the organisation / implementation of these actions. The on-line network which worked with the Asana support turned out to be useful for everyone during the Covid emergence, allowing exchanges not to be interrupted.