Play Safe - protecting athletes especially the youngest from health and safety hazards in minifootball

Background Sport providers have a legal duty of care to protect the welfare of young athletes and ensure they are not exposed to risk in any aspect of sports delivery. This is best achieved through continually updating knowledge and skills for providing a safe and healthy environment. Through trainings & seminars organizational and administrative capacity of partner organizations will increased towards identifying opportunities related to injury prevention connected with bad infrastructure. Objectives The main objective of our project PLAY SAFE– PROTECTING YOUNG ATHLETES FROM HEALTH AND SAFETY HAZARDS IN MINIFOOTBALL is to establish a regional Balkan initiative for protecting athletes, especially the youngest, from health and safety hazards, by improving the conditions for training and competitions through building organizational and administrative capacity for ensuring safe sport infrastructure – its maintenance and accessibility to it. Implementation Despite COVID-19 difficulties the project implemented all planned activities - partners developed guidelines for sports clubs on how to keep the sport environment safe & interactive map & calendar, 5 transnational workshops for exchanging good practices and experience carried out; set up network of minifootbal organizations and admin staff, increased administrative capacity, developed compendium of best practices and a hakathon for validation of acquired skills carried out. Large media campaign. Achievements 5 training programs1 HAKATHON organized1 SET of guidelines for sport clubs on how to keep the sport environment safe with good practices for protecting young athletes1 interactive map with minifootbal grounds (hosted on the websites of all partners and on the site of the European Minifootball Association)3 national yearly calendars for each country for demonstrations and fundraising4 Social media accountsOnline media campaign & 1 pressconference.. partners' members participants impacted