DRAWS, promoting sport integrity among youths

The project DRAWS (Doping Raising Awareness among youths in Sport recreational environments), co-financed by the Erasmus+ Sport Programme of the European Union, aims to promote sport integrity by both combating doping among recreational and non-elite young sport practitioners (14-19 years) and preventing the establishment of a pro-doping culture in this same environment.

UNIVERSITÀ CATTOLICA DEL SACRO CUORE will lead the project together with other eight European partners, namely: CONI - COMITATO OLIMPICO NAZIONALE ITALIANO and LEGA PRO - LEGA ITALIANA CALCIO PROFESSIONISTICO (Italy), FISAF - CZECH AEROBIC AND FITNESS UNION FISAF.CZ (Czech Republic), IOTC - INTERNATIONAL OLYMPIC TRUCE CENTRE (Greece), LUSF - LIETUVOS SPORTO FEDERACIJU SAJUNGA (Lithuania), LSFC - LATVIJAS SPORTA FEDERACIJU PADOME (Latvia); SDRUZHENIE LEVSKI SPORT ZA VSICHKI (Bulgaria), and HAŠK MLADOST (Croatia).

How to increase youth’s engagement in doping prevention

The Partnership will cooperate and work together for 36 months (from January, 2020 to December, 2022) to create and disseminate a set of open training courses strongly linked to the existing pro-doping cultures and to produce an educational comic and some stripes on this topic using a visual and more user friendly language for youth. The big goals of DRAWS will be to both increase youth’s engagement in doping prevention and raise the awareness and knowledge of European polices on it.

On April 27-28, 2020 the partnership held its Kick-off Meeting, marking the beginning of a three-year collaboration. The event was a little bit different from what expected, due to the current Covid19 health emergency: the personal contact, a common feature of this kind of events, was replaced by a two-day online meeting that brought virtually together partners from all around Europe. The Partnership worked smartly and efficiently, sharing information and proposals and planning actions for the next steps. Despite the uncommon conditions, empathy and good initiatives have still been the key factors of this first virtual event of the Project.

The goals of the project

The project DRAWS aims at promoting the integrity of sport by combating doping within recreational and non-elite young sport practitioners, starting from evidences (scientific studies, researches, and EU policies). The project addresses the topic of doping in recreational environment thanks to the involvement of partner organizations from Eastern and Mediterranean regions in Europe that have been touched by doing scandals in the past and that could therefore be particularly interested in fighting and preventing the establishment of a pro-doping culture among youth sport participants. The consortium involves organizations that play different roles within the sport field. Such a partnership allows for a more effective implementation of the actions foreseen. Specifically:

• recreational sport organizations, such as Cesky svaz aerobiku a fitness FISAF, Levski - Sport for All and HAŠK Mladost, that work daily with the target group of the project (young participants in recreational sport); 
• unions of sport federations and National Olympic Committees, like the Latvian Sports Federation Council, the Lithuanian Union of Sport Federations, Comitato Olimpico Nazionale Italiano and Lega PRO, that are very active in the field of doping prevention and education of young athletes;
• a well known international institution that works in the dissemination of sport integrity and values, that is the International Olympic Truce Centre;
• an academic leader with strong experience in the field of integrity in sport and a deep knowledge of training and educating sport actors, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore.

The rationale of the proposal is searching effectiveness in combating doping, notably in preventing the creation of a pro-doping culture through a set of educational activities among sport participants in recreational environments, through the following processes:

• Deepening the knowledge about recreational environments participants/athletes’ knowledge, attitudes, opinions and motivational orientations toward doping/substances to orient the contents and maximize the effectiveness of the educational tools;
• Designing and testing an effective training course for raising awareness and knowledge about doping among youth in recreational sport contexts (aged between 14-19 years old);
• Creating an attractive and immediate educational tool on doping prevention, knowledge and awareness raising in the form of comic/stripes, with the active engagement of young participants from the recreational environments;
• Implementing an educational doping campaign using the EDU-communication tools created, that are the training courses and the comic/stripes;
• Sharing and disseminating the EDU-communication tools at EU level (training courses + comic/stripes), to prevent and combat the establishment of a pro-doping culture among young participants in recreational sport environments.

The key-elements of the project

A key-element of the proposal is activating a bottom-up process with the direct involvement of the target group which will lead to a structural link between specific data on doping knowledge, opinions, attitudes and motivational orientations in recreational environment on one side, and tailored awareness training courses for preventing doping in young sport participants in recreational environment on the other.

According to this proposal, the project will implement:

• A data collection to better understand the knowledge, attitudes, opinions and eventually motivational orientations toward controlled and uncontrolled PAES (doping) use of recreational athletes (aged 14-19 years old);
• An effective training and awareness raising course on doping and substances used in recreational sport, inspired and strongly oriented by the data collection;
• A bottom-up-created visual-based educational tool against doping, built with the engagement of recreational environments athletes/participants, that will consist in a comic or a series of stripes;
• A strong dissemination of the EDU-communicational tools created;
• A document that collects a series of suggestions, reflections, thoughts, visual materials (like videos, drawings, photos) that young people of the recreational environments involved in the project want to report to the European Union about doping.

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