The Response

Creating Positive Sport Experiences

A critical factor in determining whether young people persist or withdraw from sport is the quality of their sporting experience. Children will flourish and remain involved when their sporting experiences are empowering. If sport is to be part of the solution for combating inactivity and obesity, effective interventions are needed to ensure that sporting experiences are positive and support continued participation.

Promoting Empowering Coaches

The PAPA project responds to the challenge of how to reduce childhood inactivity and obesity by trying to create a sport environment that promotes positive experiences, emotional health and psychosocial growth and development. Guided by contemporary theories of motivation, PAPA will focus on creating optimal experiences for young people in the popular sport of football. Through their interactions with players, coaches play a vital role in shaping the quality of children's sport participation. By educating coaches on principles of fostering optimal motivation and providing them with concrete strategies for creating an empowering environment in training and matches, we think that the coach-created climate can be improved and result in improved health and well-being for its players.

The delivery of all workshops for the main trial phase of the PAPA Project has now been completed in Norway. In total 17 workshops were conducted by the seven selected Coach Educators throughout three different regions in the country.

The first Greek PAPA team meeting with the CEs was held in the University of Thessaly. Head coaches (Aleksiou V., Patronis N., Keramidas P., Sigalas V., Voutiritsas T., Stefanis E., Loutsos G., Masouras A., Karagiannis T., Gioti G., & Kalogiannis P.) of youth football teams from all over the Greece visited the Department of Physical Education and Sport Sciences to discuss the key elements and future planning of the PAPA project.