AFTERMATCH Life Beyond Sport

AFTERMATCH Life Beyond Sport (2016-2017)

AFTERMATCH project tackles the situation in which athletes experience an high risk of a traumatic and unproductive exit from the sport’s world: in other words, the project pays attention to the last part of an athletes career, especially for non-professional athletes or for athletes not equipped with a safe “professional parachute” during the jump into the labour market.

The main focus is on “pre-emptive exit strategy planning adoption”, on “evaluation and raising awareness about useful sport-related soft skills” and finally on “innovative exit-oriented training modules to be included in traditional institutionalized training paths”. For these reasons, AFTERMATCH considered the meso-dimension of #DualCareer (e.g. trainers, coaches, sport managers, etc.), creating the conditions for a successful exit strategy of the athlete from the sport career.

So said, AFTERMATCH project contributed to increase the knowledge about #DualCareer through a small scale survey about the situation of dual career in Europe and in particular in 5 European South – Eastern Countries (Italy, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Poland and Greece), which provided a solid base for the development of a new intervention model.

The AFTERMATCH Model is an innovative training tool, aiming at promoting transition to post-sport career in traditional training paths by valorising sport-related acquired transversal skills, and dedicated to 3 different targets:

Module A: sport trainers/coaches and managers;
Module B: teachers and professors of schools or academies;
Module C: employers and HR managers in the public and private companies.

The Model had been tested and validated in 5 different EU countries and the feedbacks collected created the base for a fine-tuning of the Model and for a formal adoption: 20 protocols had been signed by sport-related stakeholders committing to include AFTERMATCH models in their usual training paths.

AFTERMATCH project was co-funded by Erasmus+ Sport programme and coordinated by Forcoop CORA Venice (Italy), in partnership with Federazione Italiana Canoa & Kayak (Italy), Economic Institut of Maribor (Slovenia), Sportna Zveza Maribor (Slovenia), Balgaska Masters Federatzia (Bulgaria), Towarzystwo Sportowe Iron Man (Poland) and InterMediaKT (Greece).