On January 15 and 16 partners of the Erasmus+-funded project Match Point met for the transnational project’s third meeting in Vienna, hosted by the University of Vienna.

The general objective of the project is to combat doping especially in tennis recreational environments through the establishment of a transnational network and creation of engaging, deterring and detecting educational programmes and innovative open resource online educational courses that will lead to the development of an Ethical Code.



The 24-month project aims to positively influence young non-professional tennis athletes’ and coaches’ culture and attitudes against doping, protecting their health and moral ethics and supporting the integrity of sports as well as its positive values and principles.

Project’s third meeting started with the welcome by the host Mr Arnold Baca and continued with the partners presenting good practices of their national anti-doping agencies and within their organisations. The outline of the contents and functionality of the online module has also been presented. This platform will be used to provide information for athletes, coaches and other interested audiences how to train better and improve physical endurance while staying clean from performance enhancing substances.



On the second day the dissemination strategy was presented by Mr Andrej Pisl on behalf of EUSA, followed by the discussion involving future social media usage, materials published and slogan used for the project. The meeting finished with the hosts presenting data simulation for tennis players. The test gathers data on athlete’s stamina and abilities, which could then be compared to one’s performance and help identify signs of suspicious changes. The next meeting will be held in Poland in September 2020.

Match Point is led by the Bulgarian Tennis Federation (BUL), partnering with the Polish Tennis Federation (POL) and Romanian Tennis Federation (ROU) as tennis governing bodies, University of Vienna and Austrian institute for Sport Medicine (AUT) as a research partner and EUSA Institute (SLO) as European Non-Governmental organisation. The project is co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union as a collaborative partnership, and runs between January 2019 and December 2020.



EUSA representatives also took the opportunity of their stay in Vienna to meet the representatives of the Unisport Austria, EUSA member association, and European Paralympic Committee (EPC), discussing current cooperation, mutual projects and plans for the future.