SportBoard APP: technology for education through sport

With the support of several European partners, including Sport et Citoyenneté, the SantCugatCreix association has developed a mobile application designed to reinforce the integrity of amateur sports competitions: the SportBoard application. Its president, Miquel Martinez, tells us more about this tool.

The SportBoard APP is a tool based on the participation of the sport’s community (athletes, families, coaches, managers or sports resource managers, public administrations…) recording situations, conducts or behaviours that positively or negatively affect integrity, linking a set of indicators and recording them in a mobile application.

This participation is used to monitor and interpret trends in order to provide efficient self-regulation of grassroots sports organisations and to propose informed solutions based on participation data. The different governing bodies can also receive data in real time. SportBoard is thus an active observer of our sport system, which we call the “Ethics Monitoring System”.

The Faculty of Psychology, Education and Sport Sciences of the University of Barcelona has developed 352 indicators of behaviours, situations or behaviours that occur in throughout the sport field in both positive and negative versions. These behavioural indicators include the following categories: bullying and harassment; Discrimination; Doping; Abuse; Violence, Match-fixing, not forgetting the good sport practices: Solidarity, Teamwork, Attitude, Responsibility…

The aim is to raise awareness of negative behaviour in sport and to make good practice visible. The application is very quick and intuitive and requires each contribution to be located in the setting in which it has occurred (training, competition, dressing room, sport stands) and the role of the agent involved, along with the age and gender of the athlete involved.

The indicators are distributed in 4 blocks (Respect, Fair-Play, Healthy Sport and Quality), each of them containing a secondary and a tertiary level necessary to follow or accurately describe the situations derived from the observed behaviours. Users’ contributions and comments receive personalised online feedback from the team of psychologists linked to the project with the aim of offering, if necessary, support or training advice on the situation described.

Towards a European observatory of behaviour in grassroots sport

Periodically, a research team promoted by the University of Barcelona globally analyses all the records with the aim of shaping future actions or needs of all the people and groups involved, adapted to the realities that have been measured with the system.

The most ambitious goal of the project would be to build a European observatory of behaviour in grassroots sport with the potential of all the data collected.

This article was published in the magazine Sport and Citizenship n°57 : protecting sport integrity