Location and general information
Access to Sport - 
Gender Equality - 
Healthy lifestyle - 
Personal development - 
Strengthening partnershipsContext
Commercialisation of sport has led to a reduction in its educational role. Instead of using sport to educate and promote healthy lifestyles and positive social values, the focus is on top performance. There is also an increase in negative phenomena in and around sport, directly linked to the widespread crisis of social and moral values.
Not all young sportsmen/sportswomen will become top athletes, but they should all strive to be top people. Children go to school because they have to and do sports because they want to, which illustrates the relevance of sport during childhood.
Project goals
The aim is to revitalise the educational role of football, utilising the coaches’ influence and contributing to the youngsters’ upbringing. The training module teaches coaches how to introduce other topics of relevance to everyday life in their sessions, to help the youngsters become open-minded, free-thinking and active citizens, i.e. use football to turn them into life champions.
In the first stage, its specific objectives will be as follows:
- Set the framework for proper usage of non-formal educationthrough sport: develop a curriculum with three areas of intervention – for coaches, youngsters and parents; capacity building
- Test the model of educational work in sport directly on 2,000 children, to make it a replicable tool for other age categories/countries/disciplines
- Present the Life Champions concept to more than 2,000,000 people through an extensive Creating Life Champions campaign
Project content
The project will comprise a number of activities with different formats, starting from developing educational modules for three main target groups (youngsters, coaches and parents). It will include six regional info days in the countries involved, to present the concept and approach and invite the coaches and youngsters to apply for the summer camps.
Thirty coaches from all over the region will be selected for training. Preference is given to the coaches who use the knowledge and skills they have gained at summer camps run by famous players Dejan Stankovic (DEKI5) and Goran Pandev (Pandev Academy) or in their regular coaching activities. The focus is on those from disadvantaged groups.
An extensive media campaign will be run to reach at least 2 million people, underlining the Life Champions messages, with famous athletes as its main ambassadors.
The project will end with a major international conference to present the main results and the advantages of this new working model in sports, to promote the utilisation of sport in educating new generations.
Partners
