“Jump ball” for the BASKI training toolkit

On May 10, 2022, the Basketball for Life Skills (BASKI) multiplier event took place from 10.00 to 14.00 at the Anatolia premises (Eleftheriades Library and Anatolia gymnasium).

BASKI is an EU-funded Erasmus+ sports project for which Educational Association Anatolia is a partner in a consortium of seven organizations from six countries. The leader of the consortium is the Cyprus Basketball Federation and other partners include the Center for Social Innovation (CSI) - Cyprus, the Bulgarian Basketball Federation, the North Macedonian Basketball Federation, the Romanian Basketball Federation, and ASD Margherita Sports e Vita (MSV) - Italy. The project promotes education in and through sports with a special focus on skills development. 

More than 30 basketball coaches, sports educators, physical education students, and sports decision-makers, including professors and students from the Sports Education Department of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki as well as two basketball athletes in dual-career were introduced to the outputs of the project during the first part of the event in the Eleftheriades Library.  The dual-career athletes are Nikos Stavropoulos - now an Assistant professor of the Sports Education Dept. of the Aristotle University and a member of the Greek Basketball Federation Development Committee and Konstantinos Verginis – now a member of the Board of SAAK basketball club.  Dr. Maria Kyriakidou, Professor and Chair of the ACT Humanities and Social Sciences Division along with Mr. Stepan Partemian, ACT activities coordinator, presented the aims of the project, the website, and the training modules produced by the BASKI consortium. An interesting Q&A session followed. 

(From left) Stepan Partemian, ACT activities Coordinator, Nikos Stavropoulos, Assistant professor of the Sports Education Dept. of the Aristotle University, Dr. Maria Kyriakidou, Professor and Chair of the ACT Humanities and Social Sciences Division, Christos Galazoulas, Professor Division of Sports Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Konstantinos Verginis – now a member of the Board of SAAK basketball club.

Basketball coaches, sports educators, physical education students, and sports decision-makers were introduced to the outputs of the project. 

In the second part of the event, basketball coaches and physical education teachers piloted the BASKI training program by actually testing the BASKI training drills with more than 70 primary education students from four local schools and organizations in Thessaloniki, including a group of children who came under the auspices of the ‘Faros tou Kosmou’ organization, an NGO working with socially marginalized children of the Roma community of Dendropotamos in western Thessaloniki.

Everyone (both coaches and students) received certificates of participation and a t-shirt with the project logo to remember this unique and successful event. The next step of the BASKI project is the final conference that will take place on June 3-4 in Cyprus.

 You can find more information about the BASKI program here.