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Irish Times Highlights YSI Projects
Screaming at referees and insulting players has become all too common at youth sporting matches, but a YSI Team of secondary school students hopes to change that. Transition year students at Largy College in Clones, Co Monaghan, have set up a project called “P1 P2 – Person First, Player Second”, which encourages a zero-tolerance approach towards sideline and player-to-player abuse of underage GAA and soccer players. Sascha Cumiskey, Youth Social Innovators (YSI) guide at the school, said the idea came from a class discussion about the abuse they witnessed at a match they had attended. The students surveyed 300 young people involved in sports about the level of abuse they have seen or experienced themselves and found that 100% of respondents had either heard, seen abuse or been on the receiving end of it.
Some of the comments were really awful and pretty shocking
From insulting their playing to calling them names, to swearing at them and, for girls in particular, there was a lot of body shaming
Many young people said they gave up sports because they couldn’t handle all the abuse. “Based on that, they thought about how they could tackle it. So they came up with a safer flag initiative, so clubs have to reach certain criteria and then get a flag. “One of the things a club would have to do is they’d have to have an information session with parents; they have a presentation done on that.”
Another project highlighted in The Irish Times is Scoil Mhuire Secondary School, Buncrana, Co Donegal, which has started a project called Repop, which is similar to Depop, a second-hand clothes-selling website, but which is specifically for secondary school students.
Read more about these projects in the Irish Times
