Play To Train

The project Play to Train officially started in January 2019, involving three organizations: OPES, Champions Factory and Academy Rudi Hiti from three countries (Italy, Bulgaria, Slovenia). The initial duration was 18 months (until June 2020), but the COVID situation constrained the partenrs to ask first for an extension and then the suspension of project from October 2020 to June 2021, with the restarting of the project in July 2021 ending in September 2021. The project idea started from the need to contrast the deep gap existing between men and female participation in the sport field, with a particular reference to the coaching field and referring specifically in the three realities in which the partners work. To contribute to contrast this phenomenon, partners identified three main objectives:1) promote the representation and participation of employed and volunteer female coaches in the coaching workforce at all levels; 2) increase the number of female coaches by creating tools encouraging and supporting female coaches’ preparation at the grassroots level also by setting an environment which favours their participation;3) spread awareness about gender equality in sport at grassroots level as a means that contribute to the development of the sport field in general, involving all its potential.Partners started with the collection of good practices to organize a training path for their participants to be able to gain competences on promoting female coaching in the sport field and favoring gender equality in general.During the project, partners created a team of 30 mentors among which athlets, volunteers, managers, coaches, trainers who took part to the first part of the international meeting for multipiers in Rome (4-6 October 2019). Already during the meeting, participants started their path as mentors able to plan local activities in groups to be done in the following months in their local realities. The outbreak of the pandemic changed the timing and affected the implementation of local activities. Some of them started and finish between October 2019 and February 2020, other started and were stopped and other did not start at all. In the end, the team managed to organize:•1 activity in Slovenia made of 3 main parts (2 webinars and a summer camp) involving 174 people online and 140 offline (between staff and athlets);•1 activity in Bulgaria with a workshop on gender equality in sport involving 20 people;•5 activities in Italy (the local activity #whenwomencoach in three regions and “In campo diversi ma uguali” in 5 regions involving in total: 20 women who started to coach and 340 students and atlhets.Pilot activities and online interactions allowed for collecting feedbacks and practical examples that can be relicated and readapted to other contexts. Activities and feedbacks were presented at the evaluation meeting done in Ljubliana on 7-8 August 2021. The meeting gave the possibilty to debate and collect contributions to finalize the toolkit, the final outcome of the project and a guidelines for clubs and associations willing to favor gender equality in sport. A final meeting was organized in Sofia on 1st September 2021 where some representatives of the prooject team gather together at National Sport Academy of Sofia to present the project results and dicuss about following steps.