SportBoard project is a follow-up initiative of Ethics4Sport (E4S) Erasmus Plus Partnership aimed to improve good governance of grassroots sport organizations and governing bodies by proposing a holistic approach towards monitoring and managing ethics behaviour of child and young athletes. After the end of E4S’s implementation, Sant Cugat Creix and Anderlini Sport Club made several important observations leading to the elaboration of the SportBoard initiative. The first observation was that there is a lack of information on indicators of ethical (non-ethical) behavior of athletes in the sport field. This creates difficulty for grassroots sports organizations and governing bodies to identify cases of non-ethical behaviour, properly analyse them and manage. In this regard the project partners came up with the first specific objective: to develop a set of indicators of ethical (non-ethical) behavior of child and young athletes for its further monitoring and management.
Indicators for measuring achievement:
- at least 50 scientific publications on ethical behavior indicators in the field of sport are reviewed for development of SportBoard indicators,
- SportBoard indicators are organised around at least the 6 following categories of behaviour: (1) harassment & bullying; (2) discrimination, whether it be based on origin, colour, gender, religion, disability or sexual orientation; (3) doping; (4) abuse, including sexual abuse; and (5) violence, (6) match fixing.
- For each category at least 7 indicators of ethical (non-ethical) behavior of athletes are proposed and described.
In addition to that, the Council of Europe declares a lack of standards and appropriate tools to ensure good governance from sport organisations to sport federations and governing bodies (Promotion of good governance in sport. COE, 2018; Guidelines on sport integrity, COE, 2020). In order to contribute to improvement of good governance, the project partners propose the second SportBoard specific objective: to develop an online digital platform for monitoring and managing ethics behaviour of child and young athletes. This Platform will include the following tools:
- Online educational course for sport coaches and physical education teachers on monitoring and managing ethical behavior of child and young athletes,
- SportBoard App for registration of indicators of ethical / non-ethical behavior of child and young athletes,
- Online observatory tool for monitoring and preliminary analysis of ethical behavior of child and young athletes.
Indicators for measuring achievement:
- Short-term (10h) online educational course for sport coaches and physical education teachers on monitoring and managing ethical behavior of child and young athletes are developed and available in three languages EN, ES, IT,
- At least 140 sport coaches and 60 physical education teachers from Spain and Italy working with children and youngsters attended the SportBoard online educational course.
- At least 150 coaches and physical education teachers used SportBoard Mobile App for monitoring and managing ethical behaviour of child and young athletes.
- Online observatory tool will receive at least 800 registers of ethical (non-ethical) sport behaviour (300 for the first round of the Pilot implementation and 500 for the second round),
- The project Pilot Programme will be tested in 15 types of sport
Another observation that was done by the project partners was that in order to have an impact on policies and ethics in sports, there is a need to establish a cooperation model between grassroots sport organisations and public authorities for providing efficient and coherent sport policies within one territory. The Council of Europe acknowledges that public authorities have a key role to play in promoting the implementation of good governance principles (Promotion of good governance in sport. COE, 2018). However, Guidelines on sport integrity (COE, 2020) declares a “lack of constructive cooperation between sports organisations and public authorities”. Thus, the third specific objective of the SportBoard initiative is to develop and test a model of cooperation between grassroots sports organizations and public authorities for providing efficient and coherent monitoring and management of ethics behaviour of child and young athletes.
Indicators for measuring achievement:
- the model of cooperation between grassroots sports organizations and public authorities is tested within two territories: Sant Cugat Creix and City of Modena,
- at least 30 practical recommendations on application of the developed model are developed,
- at least 15 sports governing bodies from 5 EU countries expressed their interest to apply the SportBoard holistic approach towards monitoring and managing ethics behaviour of child and young athletes.