The YouMind (Youth Individual Sports Mindset) project is a small-scale partnership project that aims to raise awareness about the importance of mental health in youth sport and to develop different strategies to prevent mental health issues for young athletes.

The project entered its second year of development in 2025 and on January 8th the four partner organisations: EUSA Institute (SLO) ENGSO Youth (LTU), University of Miskolc Sport Club MEAFC (HUN) and CUS Salerno (ITA), gathered for an online seminar on mental health and meeting to discuss the next steps. 

Andrej Pisl, Projects and Policy manager and coordinator from EUSA, introduced the meeting by reminding the project goals, the previous activities and the next ones to come as part of the project. Indeed, the kick-off meeting was held in January 2024, since then, the project partners met again in Miskolc in July during EUSA Games and conceived and shared an online survey on mental health issues among young athletes, as a tool of data gathering for the project. Young athletes from the four project partners answered the survey and delivered key information that will help launch further workshops and educational material about mental health. 

The online event held on January 8th of 2025 consisted in two parts. For the first one, EUSA Institute invited Ms Sasa Cecic Erpic, Associate Professor of Psychology at the Faculty of Sport of the University of Ljubljana. Through her expertise, Ms Cecic Erpic passed on a wealth of knowledge that is crucial to workshop planning. With 10+ years experience in European project planning and her academic research experience, she exposed insights about dual careers and mental health, the importance of role models, and gave some recommendations for the workshops to come. 

For the second part of the meeting, focusing on workshop planification, Milia Molinié, ESC Volunteer from EUSA, shared with project partners an analysis of the survey in order to better understand the needs and concerns about young athletes that will be attending the workshops. As the workshops will be held in different countries, it is crucial to reflect on the most effective way to organize them taking into account the future participant’s profiles and aspirations. We are glad that the information we collected will help increase data on the specific topic of mental health in sports for the team project, and later on, contribute to raise awareness among the youth. 

Finally, Nadica Sechkov, Youth Project manager from ENGSO Youth, shared feedback from workshop sessions organized within the framework of previous projects led in the field of youth. Her presentation delivered technical tools on how to approach the topic and gave a wide range of both theoretical and practical methods to conduct workshop sessions. 

Vincenzo Cusati from CUS Salerno and Eva Antal from MEAFC shared the first projections of the workshops that they will be organizing, taking into account the previous recommendations given through project feedbacks, the survey analysis and the seminar. 

The project partners will meet online again in February to finalise the workshops format that will be held during the Spring in each one of the partner countries and the team will also prepare digital educational tools and additional promotional material.

We are looking forward to bringing these activities into life and seeing the outcomes and benefits for young athletes across Europe. For more information, please see https://youmind.eusa.eu