Rome

and
March 4, 2023

After an excellent first meeting in Amsterdam, a second meeting in beautiful Rome

The day when people arrived at different times allowed for a short but nice visit of the city of Rome with a small group, sharing experiences of the last months, upcoming events, and nice moments. The day was finished with, of course, a local Italian pizza.

The second day we visited “Centro Olimpico Giulio Onesti” where we had our session. This sports centre was built in July 1954, designed by the architect Annibale Vitellozzi, at the behest of the then president of CONI Giulio Onesti, after the assignment to the city of Rome of the Games of the XVII Olympiad. The place to be for a great sports atmosphere.

In the morning we were welcomed by Mr. Sergio Mignardi, president of the Italian hockey federation and Sabina Zampetti, EHF Executive Board member. After this warm welcome, we started an intensive day with the objective of structuring our different toolkits. During the morning, Tom from the European Hockey federation facilitated a brainstorming about the expectations and design criteria we should take into account when producing the 4 different toolkit parts which are :

  • Coach Development
  • Life skills program
  • Grassroots manual
  • Event manuel

During the lunch break, we had the opportunity to visit the Field Hockey venue and to meet the great Rome Hockey ID team coached by Marco Carboni. It was the opportunity for us to exchange with the athletes and to see their really impressive abilities on the pitch. Marco has been a lifelong hockey ID coach and has worked intensively last years to give more intellectually disabled the possibility to enjoy hockey.

In the afternoon, Adam and Michele from the University of Copenhagen presented their summary report of the sport for people with mental disabilities in the scientific literature. This analysis of more than 100 pages gave us a lot of really interesting insight to develop our 4 toolkits. Simona and Federica from the italian federation followed up with their analysis of the european hockey ID scene and shared all materials gathered related to the toolkit topics.
By different groups of 3 people we then started to collect all the feedback from the stakeholders. Thanks to these feedbacks, we managed to design the first direction of the blueprint for the 4 toolkit parts.

Each leading person was then giving his/her presentation of his/her blueprint design toolkit (Norman Hughes – Coach development/ Antoine Fournier – Life Skills/ Frederica Gerosa – Grassroots / Natascha Bruers – Event Manual). With the excellent feedback and knowledge of all we can work on each toolkit now and looking forward to the final draft version which will be produced by mid this year. The aim of these blueprint versions is that we will test them in the partner countries to see how they work in reality.

In addition to this collective work about structuring the toolkits, we attended some very interesting presentations form Marta Puig and Linda Overmeiren who have presented their experience in developing Hockey ID in Spain respectively Germany.

At the end of day one we finalized the day with a joint italian pasta dinner where we had the chance to get to know each other a bit better.

During day 2 we talked about our dissemination activities and focused especially on the next steps moving forward with our Erasmus LIA programme. The outcomes of this meeting and some pictures can be found enclosed. We’ll be working towards our next session which will be after the summer in Prague.

Best regards,

Natascha and Antoine