Project ONSIDE: Enhancing the skills of sport officials in Europe

Over 220 participants attended the International Event of Sport Officiating last week to discover more about the EU funded ONSIDE project and the International Federation for Sport Officials (IFSO). The ONSIDE project aims to ensure the area of sport officiating is able to develop and flourish through an innovative and cross-sport transnational project.

The project has been built to provide the opportunity to define the generic skills and competences common across different sports and needed by sport officials and then to develop innovative fit-for-purpose e-learning courses for sport officials with modules to engage inform and up skill them. This European project included all sports and started in 2018.

The working group has joined together over the different practical exercises which have allowed to describe all the match officials’ functions and their requirements. ETTU has been one of the main partners in this project. Isabelle BEUMIER one of the most experienced match officials in Europe is representing ETTU in this project.

“An important part of the research work was the survey to National Federations for which I saw with pride that table tennis was the sport with the most answers. Thank you to those responsible for collaborating so good. The results of this survey confirmed the purpose of this project: it is difficult to find enough referees to keep them to find women to find young to gain respect… and the vast majority of answers indicated a need of educating tools to improve the quality of their team ” said Isabelle BEUMIER.

During the project six e-learning modules have been created (communication conflict management personal brand team work honesty and ethics observation and decision making) and for the other modules like administration or sport integrity the framework is provided.

The last meeting of this project will be in December 2020 but Isabelle BEUMIER will ensure together with her colleagues in ETTU URC that all the gained knowledge will be used also in the further development of ETTU match officials.

“ A beautiful adventure ends but another begins with the adaptation of the material to our sport. Thank you to EOSE SOUK ETTU and all the partners for this initiative and these fruitful exchanges ” concluded BEUMIER.