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Scottish Sports Futures - Jump2it

Project: Jump2it

Region: Glasgow

Amount approved: £66,587 (Big Impact Award)

SSF delivers health education combined with sport for young people both in and outside schools in Glasgow and the surrounding area. They have mainly used basketball as the hook to date as it is different enough to attract people, but not so commonplace as to have developed an associated culture around it, such as football which is male dominated and can be a catalyst for sectarian violence. (Continued below video).

Ongoing connections with the Scottish Rocks professional basketball team enable SSF to use powerful role models to enforce the health messages. These players receive training in the three main areas for the health education (diet, smoking and alcohol) from various partner agencies. This combination means that participants are impressed enough to take note of both the health and social messaging alongside the sport.

This project is a pilot enhancement of the alcohol awareness component in twenty Glasgow primary schools in high deprivation areas. With this Big Impact Award, around 2,000 pupils aged 10 and 11 will benefit from a new form of the Jump2it sport and healthy living school road shows.

Each roadshow is a workshop for groups of around 100 young people conducted by Scottish Rocks players. Pupils are split into four subgroups and rotated between the different sections (smoking, diet, alcohol and the basketball exercises). Drinkaware support has enabled SSF, in partnership with Alcohol Focus Scotland, to develop a more engaging alcohol education tool for the relevant section, taking the form of an interactive game board. This is being piloted in Glasgow as it has been identified as the area in greatest need of enhanced alcohol education.

These roadshows are followed by blocks of basketball coaching delivered by SSF staff. These are one-hour weekly sessions over six weeks. The grant would help to supplement these with a second resource, an interactive DVD, to repeat the alcohol material and feature the Scottish Rocks players. This has not been possible until now and SSF have found that continuity can diminish as they cannot maintain the links between school pupils and the professional sportsmen. This has caused the health messaging to lose momentum at the second project phase.

By the time pupils reach the third stage, inter-school tournaments, the alcohol messages will now be far more firmly and consistently engrained than before due to the resources. When they are re-emphasised at these competitions as well, through take-home materials and further presentations, the whole educational process will have occurred within a far more robust and coherent learning framework than was previously possible.

The resulting tournament finals will then be played during the half-time interval of a Rocks match which gives participants real motivation to get involved. The combination of innovative and enjoyable resources throughout, contact with professionals and a tournament final played in front of the crowd at an actual game will engage pupils to the extent where they cannot help but digest the alcohol messages.

An award ceremony will then take place in the winning school to which families are invited; this not only gives the winners’ peers a reminder of the health messages but spreads the information to adults. Even those pupils who did not engage with the second phase, the basketball coaching, will still have come into contact with the professionals and benefited from the alcohol awareness game, learning the lesson which underpins this project and all SSF’s work: you’ve got to put good things in to your body to get good things out of it.

Page last updated by: Matthew Bateman, 16 May 2012.

Page checked on: 03 Dec 2010