Quality must be the most relevant key point of the sport programs with people with intellectual disabilties

The idea that sport is a fundamental activity to develop the motor and psychosocial skills of people with intellectual disabilities is becoming increasingly widespread and it is important to start practicing it since childhood.

Furthermore, sport involvement should permit the integration between young people with intellectual disabilities and peers with typical development, improve people’s overall well-being and allow families to live positive experiences and feel part of a community, the sports community, which values ​​their children regardless of their difficulties.

Realizing these goals requires:

  • A sports club that commits itself to defining a specific and documentable sports program
  • The involvement of the local schools and the ASLs of the national health system in the recruitment of the participants in these programs, and in providing the service of the visit to sports fitness
  • The presentation to the families of the sports program and its aims
  • The choice of professionals working in the field in the realization of the project, who are graduates in motor sciences, sport psychologists, speech therapists and sports doctors and who in turn are trained to work with young people with intellectual disabilities
  • The preparation and implementation of motor tests, interviews with families and psychological assessment systems of the behavior of young people in training which identifies and shows the improvements produced by sport activity during the sports season
  • The organization of public moments with parents and schools to illustrate the progress achieved and the methods used to obtain them

In short, we need to get out of the concept of “doing good” and get in the mentality of “doing it well”. We must be aware that attributing to external problems the difficulty of “doing good” (poor economic resources, poor preparation of the operators, taking as a basic idea that doing something is better than doing nothing) is just an excuse to hide our difficulties to achieve an effective service.

On the contrary, some rules direct the quality of a project:

  • Do well from the beginning
  • Everyone must be aware the quality of the service depends on him/her, regardless of the role
  • Prevent problems before they arise
  • We are a team, we work in groups
  • Measure, evaluate and let everyone know it
  • Identify each year new goals, pursuing a process of continuous improvement

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