Best Practise Sharing of Innovative and Disruptive Field Hockey Skills

6 trainers from Poland, Czech Republic and Austria have gained valuable hockey know-how from experts from HC Den Bosch during multiple sessions in the Netherlands. The participants, with the support of the European and Dutch Hockey Federation (KNHB and EHF) have processed and published all these insights and has shared them actively with all hockey trainers/coaches and others interested in the topics. The experts were from various positions and backgrounds but among others we got inspired by Marc Lammers (Olympic Gold coach Dutch National team), Sjoerd Marijne (India Women National Coach) and Raouhl Ehren (15 fold Dutch champion coach for Den Bosch). With the team we visited HC Den Bosch and met with a wide variety of sport experts and discussed a range of sport topics both relevant for grassroot as well as for performance sport. Beside the typical sport technical and tactical topics, we discussed a.o. youth development strategies, new development in hockey variants to reach all society (para hockey, funkey hockey, streethockey, walk hockey for elderly), video analysis, community programmes, club good governance, sport nutrition, self-regulation etc. We emphasized the need for proper dissemination and explored various ways of sharing the gained know-how with all trainer/coaches/officials/team staff/volunteers in the Polish, Czech and Austrian hockeyworld. See later an overview of the dissemination activities. Looking back at the programme we concluded that we have achieved that new hockey developments has found it’s way to the partner countries which enables them to make a next step up in growing hockey. We also realized that the interest from both the participants as well as their close colleagues/friends have shown various initiatives to learn more and have taken initiatives reaching out to the European hockey family to gain more know-how to improve themselves, their clubs and their federation. The participants concluded that a big asset of the programme is also the newly created network. Where they normally would be hesitant to reach out for help they have no access to a network of about 25 people with whom they like to stay in contact. On the way we have learned from about 20 hockey/sports experts and created 20 inspirational presentations which were shared with the hockey community. Focus was on dissemination in the partner countries but with the Facebook page we created we also saw interest from other countries. A spin off of the project we did not foresee was the interest of other hockey nations in Erasmus programmes. This project was one of the first hockey Erasmus projects and together with the EHF we have promoted Erasmus+ Sport opportunities among all 43 nations. This project also was inspiration for the EHF to investigate Erasmus opportunities more. This has resulted in the fact that both the EHF and Czech Hockey Federation are working close together in applying for more bids and getting involved as partner organisations (currently we’re involved in 4 bids (both running and newly applied grants)