Sports Club for Health (SCforH)

HEPA Europe working group: Sports Club for Health (SCforH)

Background

Sports and exercise are among the key types of Health-enhancing physical activity. Studies have shown that sports club participation is a major contributor to the overall level of HEPA.

Supporting sports clubs and organisations to focus more on the promotion of health-enhancing sports activities, may therefore help reduce the number of insufficiently active people in the EU.

With this in mind, in 2008, we conceived the idea of the Sports Club for Health (SCforH) approach. Since then, three funded international SCforH projects were carried out. Overall, there have been more than 50 contributors to the SCforH projects, from a total of 18 countries.

Sports clubs have been chosen as the target setting for physical activity promotion, because:

they are among the organisational settings with the highest population reach;
many of them seem to be exclusively focused on elite and sub-elite competitive sports; and
they already have access to personnel, facilities, and equipment needed to implement additional health-enhancing programs in their given sport.

Better availability and quality of health-enhancing sports activities in sports clubs would facilitate increased sport participation, especially among people who are not interested to engage in high performance-focused, elite-level sport.

International SCforH projects

In 2009, the SCforH consortium has published the first SCforH guidelines. Collaborative work of more than ten organizations involved in the first international SCforH project titled “Sports Club for Health” resulted in an updated version of SCforH guidelines. The project also established cross-institutional network and framework for the dissemination of the SCforH guidelines across the European Union member states. The activities of the project also included organisation of workshops, presentations at conferences, advocacy among European and national-level sports organisations and sport-related governmental bodies, and promotion of SCforH guidelines among sports clubs through European and national sportsassociations.

The second international SCforH project titled “Promoting National Implementation for Sports Club for Health Programmes in EU Member States” aimed to: [i] evaluate the outcomes of previous dissemination of SCforH concepts and guidelines in the European Union member states; [ii] identify best practices in disseminating and using SCforH guidelines; [iii] expand the body of evidence related to the promotion of health-enhancing physical activity in sports clubs; and [iv] update the SCforH guidelines to include the guiding principles of the SCforH approach and considerations for all age groups—children, adolescents, young adults, middle-aged adults, and seniors. The key published output of the project is the current version of SCforH guidelines.

The third SCforH project titled “Creating mechanisms for continuous implementation of the Sports Club for Health guidelines in the European Union” built upon the previous two projects by creating the SCforH online course and distributing it across Europe to nearly 4,000 stakeholders in the sports sector from 36 countries. Activities to disseminate SCforH guidelines also included organisation of a conference and several workshops, seminars, and symposia that were attended by 1,395 participants. As part of the project we have also published the SCforH book, textbook, country cards, four scientific articles, and six conference abstracts.

Recognition in the sports and health sectors

The SCforH movement has been widely recognised as a worthwhile and successful initiative. For example, in 2013, the Council of the European Union proposed the implementation of SCforH guidelines as one of the 23 indicators to evaluate HEPA levels and HEPA policies in the European Union. In 2015, the World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Office for Europe included SCforH-related questions in the survey that is part of the continuous monitoring framework for the implementation of the Council Recommendation on promoting HEPA across sectors in the European Union. The Erasmus+ Sport programme funded a total of 541 projects in the period from 2014 to 2018. Out of these projects, the ‘SCforH 2015-17’ has been recognised by the European Commission as one of the 34 “success stories” and as one of the 54 examples of good practice. The movement has also received support from the Education, Audio-visual and Culture Executive Agency of the European Commission (EACEA) and prominent umbrella sports organisations, including the International Sport and Culture Association (ISCA), the European Non-Governmental Sports Organisation (ENGSO), the European Federation for Company Sports (EFCS), and the Association for International Sport for All (TAFISA).

Aims of the Working Group

Since 2008, a SCforH working group has been operating as part of the European Network for the Promotion of Health-Enhancing Physical Activity (HEPA Europe), with the aim to facilitate efforts to continuously promote the SCforH approach; particularly in the periods between funded SCforH projects. Notwithstanding a range of important ongoing activities of the SCforH working group, it has been concluded in the SCforH 2015-17 and 2020-22 projects that the process of continuous promotion of SCforH approach should be further supported and broadened.

Given there are more than 2.5 thousand sport associations, almost a million sports clubs, and more than 60 million individual sports club members in Europe, there is a great potential reach of future SCforH initiatives.

Specific aims and future plans for the Working Group will be discussed at the HEPA Europe 2023 conference.

Events and meetings

In the past two years, the SCforH consortium has organised a total of 13 events, attracting 1333 participants. This included: 6 project team meetings attended by 111 team members and guests; 3 international symposi (the first for the representatives of sports clubs and associations, the second primarily for higher education teachers and students, and the third for physical activity promoters and researchers); 2 workshops (one for the European Physical Activity Focal Points, and the other for the physical educators in Croatia, most of whom run school sports clubs as part of their standard teaching responsibilities); a seminar for stakeholders in the sports sectors; and an international conference, bringing together approximately 130 participants from sports clubs and associations, government, and higher education institutions.

Group leadership

The interim leader of the group is Tena Matolić from the University of Zagreb, Faculty of Kinesiology, Zagreb, Croatia

All the documents can be found on the SCforH webpage.