YOUR LIFEBLOOD
MEETS OUR
KNOWLEDGE.

Our aim in youth competitive sports is to systematically improve the quality of the framework conditions for training and competition in the sports of soccer, handball, basketball, and volleyball. In addition to our background in training science, we use various methods, tools, and techniques of quality and process management as well as organizational analysis and development in cooperation with leagues, associations, and clubs.

Young talent forms the basis for German competitive sports across all disciplines. With this awareness, which is not self-evident, the importance of youth work is also growing in practice, science, but also in the media public. We act at the interfaces to ensure that the transfer between all stakeholders is as optimal as possible.

After all, competitive sports represent a whole range of facets, such as technique, tactics, athletics, agility, strength, endurance, dealing with success as well as failure, and of course fun. This offers plenty of potential for optimization.

Thus, the great importance of youth competitive sports for society as a whole lies primarily in its sustainability and not in its short-term success. Because through it, long-term and, optimally, constant sporting successes in international comparison should be achieved in the adult sector.

Concept

We understand concepts as intellectual outlines in and for competitive sports. Our concepts – consisting of fact gathering, structuring, writing, and presentation – are tailor-made with a coherent strategy for the implementation of courageous visions in sports. We help to solve conceptual questions of the sports practice with our know-how, e.g.:

• What are the core sporting tasks of the league and association to increase the proportion of German players in the national leagues?

• How do we develop a model for the training of talents in German basketball? → Example

• From which methods are certifications and audit programs for the professionalization of junior professional sports made of?

Junior-coach training

A junior coach comes to the hairdresser. She asks: “So, what do you do?” He: “I’m a junior basketball coach.” She: “I meant, what do you do for a living?”

In order to develop a job description in German basketball for the junior coach, the Basketball Bundesliga set out in 2012 to work with us on designing a system that would give 6 to 8 coaches a year the chance to turn their passion into a career. The coaches work at the club and go through different stages of working in the youth sector there in a three-year process – depending on their qualifications and interests.  Besides, the student coaches have access to the largest professional and interdisciplinary network of experts in German basketball and can expand their knowledge together over a total of 4 semesters to accompany their daily work around central attendance dates and on the edubreak SPORTCAMPUS. The first three classes have successfully completed their training and are conquering the market. Three more classes are currently in training and will take their chance.

→ More information

Certification Procedures & Audits

The objective of these procedures is to review and support internal club work for plausibility, conclusiveness, permeability, and professionalism from an external and neutral perspective. Since the 2015/16 season, 9 clubs in the BBL have been fully certified each year. The feedback from the clubs is that certification encourages them to engage in many positive processes that would not otherwise take place. These include, above all, communicative-strategic aspects that are neglected in the day-to-day running of junior professional sports. Appropriate auditing and certification processes help leagues and clubs regularly and systematically improve the quality of their youth work. Also, the knowledge gained from the work at all sites results in best-practice models that are fed to the entire community in various workshop formats.

Elite Player Performance

Between elite youth sports and professional sports, there is a key topic area to which we attach eminent importance. This is the so-called transitional or follow-up area. We help leagues, associations, national and home coaches, decision-makers – but above all players – to make this phase as positive as possible and to make the famous “leap”. Our project activities in sports games in this area:

• Player Profiles, i.e. detailed performance assessments of the most talented athletes in a domain based on expert judgmen

• Reconstruction of player careers including pattern recognition of promising parameters within competitive sports careers

• National and international competition analyses based on comparable quantitative and qualitative competition data

• Identification of factors that distinguish “world-class” athletes from “normal” competitive athletes

Quality Circles

Quality circles represent an innovative service for clubs, federations, leagues, and service institutions in competitive sports. They serve as qualitative tools for sharpening the organization’s internal “DNA” and consist of one-day preparation and follow-up phases as well as an 8-hour attendance day. In concrete terms, the participants work out specific, practicable, and effective solutions for their area of work within the framework of moderated teamwork, in alternating small groups and in various work formats. Quality Circles result in an outcome report, an action plan, and quality tools for further sustainable development of the respective organization.