The Youth Directorate of the Maltese Olympic Committee started the first part of the “Development of a National Sport Structure Programme” of the Olympic Solidarity. Fourteen Federations, who already have a youth competition programme, took part, as follows:

Aquatic Sports Association of Malta: Gail Rizzo, Keith Bartolo, Isabelle Zarb.

Malta Amateur Athletics Association: Angie Mangion, Gwen Fava, Mark Farrugia, Mario Bonello.

Malta Football Association: Tony Garzia, Mark Buttigieg, Robert Gatt.

Malta Golf Federation: Henning Schulze Doering, William Beck.

Malta Gymnastics Federation: Leanne Bartolo, Roberto de Santis.

Malta Handball Association: Matthew Mamo, Milos Stanisavljevic.

Malta Judo Federation: Neville Schembri, Ray Fava, Vito Aufieri.

Malta Netball Association: Karen Aquilina, Marcon Cassar.

Malta Rugby Football Union: Charlene Curmi.

Malta Shooting Sport Federation: Lawrence Darmanin.

Malta Table-Tennis Association: Johanna Grech, Kevin Azzopardi.

Malta Tennis Federation: Mark Gatt, Mark Abela.

Malta Volleyball Association: Srdjan Veckov, Kris Croker.

Malta Weightlifting Federation: Jesmond Caruana, Simon Brincat, Stephen Borg.

The President of the Maltese Olympic Committee, Mr Justice Lino Farrugia Sacco, welcomed the professors from Semmelweis University.

He congratulated the University and the Youth Directorate for last year’s project which was highly praised by the Olympic Solidarity. The President said that Olympic Solidarity continued their support by sponsoring the second part of this youth project and he thanked the Sport Federations for participating.

The course participants were addressed by members of the Faculty of Physical Education and Sport Sciences of Semmelweis University in Hungary:

Dr Tibor Kozsla, Strategic and International Director, the administrator of this course and Professor Csaba Sos, Head of Swimming Department and Olympic Solidarity appointed expert for this project.

Semmelweis University in Hungary is an internationally well-known state university, from where 89 Olympic champions graduated. Now Hungary ranks eighth in the Olympic medal ranking with 463 medals and has a great tradition in sport. It has a faculty devoted to physical education and sport science.

This year’s National Development Sport Structure course is all about project management. National sports restructure starts with planning. Semmelweis University is helping the Maltese Olympic Committee, National Federations, to introduce the national youth coaches to project management, “periodisation” in sport. “Periodisation simply means the division of the overall training into periods which accomplish different goals” (Anderson 1997). Wilmore and Costill (1994) define periodisation in their glossary, as “varying the training stimulus over discrete periods of time to prevent overtraining”.

Semmelweis University is basing their training on recently developed and tried software, which helps the national youth coach organise the athletes and prepare them for their competition.

The Youth Directorate of the Maltese Olympic Committee will buy a licence for each federation who subscribed to this course, so they can adopt this software for their youth elite programme. Through this software the coach can choose various alternatives to define the exercise which will later help to create statistics. It all starts by splitting where the coach refers to exercise groups, motion systems, development goals, etc.

Dr. Kozsla and Professor Sos gave examples how the Sport Federation can use this software and went into the details of problems coaches could be meeting in preparing the elite young athletes.

During the seminar Dr Kozsla also explained how through ICT the participants would be able to share their computer screens directly with the course consultant should they need clarification about certain procedures.

The 10-month course will be administered through the MOC’s Moodle on-line platform where all the coaches will be able to upload and download any material relevant to the course.

Group video conferencing sessions will connect the Hungarian experts with the Maltese sports federations, to help them adopt this modern sport planning.

The Maltese Olympic Committee gives higher importance to those federations involved in the MOC games.

The first games are the COJI Sicily 2011 at the end of May, where six federations are expected to participate. These Games will be followed by the EYOF in Trabzon, Turkey in July 2011 where the MOC will be represented by Tennis and Athletics and finally, Commonwealth Youth Games in September, in the Isle of Man, where the MOC will be participating with Swimming and Gymnastics. Other federations participating will be using this software in their top priority event.

The Semmelweis University lecturers also explained that they have many other sports related software which can be adopted after the federation has managed to introduce a strong training structure and it is hoped that this subject could be a follow up for the future.