Preventing Youth Sport Dropouts

The main goal of the project is to promote inclusion and education in and through sport with a special focus on skills development, fighting the early abandons of sports activities by teenagers.This new sports model aims to answer the possible different sports needs of young people and could represent a solution to recover young burn-out from the competition and young burn-out due to exclusion of tough top-level scouting.As stressed by several research studies, most of the reasons for children and youth dropping out of sports are connected to three main constraints:•Intrapersonal constraints, like “Not having fun”.•Interpersonal constraints, particularly due to parental and coaches’ pressures •Structural constraints, like sports-related injuries, overuse/burnout, not being given playing time, financial constraints, feeling that participation is too structured and there is not enough time for free play or just being a kid.The project PYSD creates a best practice model, issued from activities carried on real sports activities, to provide structured technical guidelines for parents, coaches and sport associations.The main question “How to minimize sports dropouts and increase youth engagement?” is answered by PYSD strategies side by side also from international-known research studies:•Redefine sports goals toward the empowering of young athletes’ resilience skills•Improve the quality of the relationships of the actors which form the sport triangle, well known as an “athletic triangle”, that describes the interpersonal relationship of coach, parent and athlete - “all parties that need to positively collaborate within the youth sport environment to enhance the sporting experience for all” (Hellstedt, 1987).The implemented activities of the PYSD project have been: -The analysis of partners’ best practices applied to tackle the dropout phenomenon-The collection of European experimented methods to reduce sport dropout and promote social inclusion -The scientific analysis about young athletes’ needs in terms of resilience skills, quality of the relationship’s athletes- coaches- parents-Creation of standardized PYSD methodology and set up of PYSD indicators to monitor the changes on resilience’s young athletes’ rate, and quality of the relationships athletes – coaches- parents. -Design of PYSD actions for parents and coaches able to apply PYSD methodology -Testing activities with athletes, coaches and parents -Validation of good functioning of PYSD model -Fine-tuning of guidelines, toolkits and instruments of control -Communication and dissemination activities focused on the involvement and inclusion of young athletes besides coaches and parents. The resilience skills and the physical and psychological wellness derived from sports, when not strictly linked to the necessity to reach an award, represent the key to stimulate the necessity to play sports. Limits and national-local habits, which negatively affect the sports abandon, can be overcome thanks to the sharing of a standardized European best practice, like the PYSD transferability best practice. PYSD measures the effectiveness of the prevention through specific indicators of project development in order to fine-tune the procedure and to ensure related sustainability. In particular, PYSD identifies a standard procedure which looks at:•Monitoring of the psychological-physical satisfaction rate of the young athletes involved.•guaranteeing social inclusion of young athletes in sport activities•Spreading of instruments useful to aid the young people to be aware of wellness derived from sports activities in terms of health, way of life, development of personality and relationship with the others.