This summer more than 30 Summer Universities contaning content related to sports will be organised by young Europeans in AEGEE locals all over Europe. They include everything from rafting to canoeing, scuba-diving, bicycle trips and much more. It is not only the Summer Universities (SU) that use active activities to promote volunteering, non-formal education and learning. Sport activities in general such as basketball and football matches, running together on a weekly/monthly basis, skiing trips, demonstration of typical dance from different countries and much more is organised by the different locals during the year. All these facts were the reason for and used in the AEGEE-København presentation of “Learning through sports in AEGEE” at SportVision2012.
Why is sport relevant for AEGEE?
”AEG… What is that?” that was the question that I was asked the most times while participating in the SportVision2012 conference in
Denmark this week. 400 participants from 38 countries gathered in the Danish capital for a conference which focused on volunteering in sports, non-formal education and health.
Why is this relevant for AEGEE you may ask? Well, at first I signed up for having making a presentation about sports in AEGEE at their open fair market partly due to my personal interest in sports: I have volunteered several times previously at sport events; I am a huge football fantastic and I have been working at the national stadium of football in Denmark for about four years. Another motivation was to make AEGEE-København take advantage of having such a big conference in Copenhagen with politicians, non-govermental organisations and companies from all over Europe.
Sports as an instrument of improving team work
When preparing for the conference I reached out to our Network to gather information about sport activities
taking place in AEGEE. There is a wide range of activities going on such as local basketball games, running teams, and AEGEE football teams e.g. in Alicante. “This past winter, we set up a football-7 team made up of AEGEE-Alicante members, who play in a local league in our town.This made people who did not know about our association join AEGEE and furthermore it has been a perfect opportunity to introduce sports in our antenna and create a new weekly activity for our members. This initiative makes us feel closer to each other and, of course, it improves teamwork,” explains Alvaro Quiñones from AEGEE-Alicante.
Move for AEGEE
AEGEE-Nijmegen takes part in something called the Batavierenrace in the Netherlands every year. This is a a running competition between the cities of Nijmegen and Enschede, in which every year a lot of the Dutch locals take part. This year, AEGEE-Nijmegen team has joined forces with runners from Groningen, Eindhoven, Utrecht, Leiden and Amsterdam. The focus is rather just to take part of it instead aiming for a victory, because in the end it is a fantastic opportunity to connect the locals.
Related to this project we have the “MOVE WEEK” which is an annual European wide campaign, which takes place all over Europe in the first week of October. The initiative was promoted during the SportVision2012 Open Market Fair where they got different individuals to commit to participate in a sportive or physical activity hopefully a lot of antennae around our Network will follow their lead.
I-just-want-to-make-you-sweat Summer Universities
Furthermore what I also discovered is that more than 20 of the Summer Universities organised this year in AEGEE have at least one activity related to sports. It is especially antennae such as AEGEE-Oviedo, AEGEE-Athina and AEGEE-Canakkale that have experience in organising sportive Summer Universities. AEGEE-Oviedo is this year organising for the 6th year in a row a SU with sports thematic (SUperAction). AEGEE-Athina have never organised a SU solely based on sports but have always included sportive activites such as beach volley and waterpolo. However, this year they are focusing on the Olympic roots of their city in their summer course (SC) “Let Me EnterTrain You” with sportive activities such as sea sports, beach sports, sport competitions, and workshops about topics such as the Olympic Games and sports in modern life.
Setting up the Sportive Working Group
As previously mentioned AEGEE-Canakkale also organised an active Summer University last year. The Summer University coordinator of that was Hakan Unal Jr. who originally is from Ankara, then moved to Canakkale and these days he is a member of AEGEE-Kyiv. However he contacted me for another reason: setting up the Sportive Working Group (SWG) of AEGEE. This topic resulted in being the main focus of the “Learning through Sports in AEGEE” presentation at the SportVision2012 due to its high relevance for the conference, me, and for our Network. If approved by the Comité Directeur and the Network the SWG will be a group of AEGEE members sharing an interest in any kind of sport, international affairs, and which uses the power of sports to unite people from different cultures. This will happen through actions such as training courses, organising AEGEE Olympiads, workshops, online blogging and much more. However, The AEGEEan would like to stress that nothing is official/certain yet.
Can you imagine your life without sport?
In the end this conference opened up my eyes for how many sportive activities are and can be taking place in our Network. At the beginning of the conference European Commissioner Androulla Vassiliou of Education, Culture, Multilingualism, Sport, Media and Youth asked “could we imagine our lives with sports?” Even though this was a conference for sports interested people I believe that if you ask many people that exact question the answer will be no. Sport brings us joy, sport can teach us and sport can unite us, we should use that even more than we already do in AEGEE!
Thank you to Alvaro Quiñones for helping with the provision of photos for the article.
Written by Patricia Anthony, AEGEE-København