Network meeting ballstars on 27.11.2025

The ballstars project team hosted another network meeting on November 27, 2025. Around 30 participants accepted the invitation to the university's boathouse, including representatives from various schools and numerous trainers from the ballstars working groups.

After being welcomed by Dr. Andreas Albert, project coordinator Lukas Toby reported on current developments in the partner program. The continued high demand for the ballstars project is particularly pleasing, as evidenced by the stable establishment of the existing ball sports groups, among other things. The schools in Oberzwehren and Trendelburg have also become two new partner schools this school year. One focus of the subsequent discussion was the still rather low participation of girls in the AGs - a topic that was repeatedly addressed and discussed during the event.

In the scientific part, results of the current project phase were presented, including correlations between sports-related skills and the sports commitment of the ballstars children (poster). In addition, there were initial insights into an ongoing study on the transition from elementary school to secondary school, which showed that this phase is challenging for the children and therefore also has an impact on their commitment to sport.

Practical reports were provided by Eva Haschke (all-day coordinator at Ernst-Abbe-Schule Oberkaufungen) and Tobias Dieckmann (all-day coordinator at Brückenhof elementary school). Both gave a vivid account of how ballstars proves itself in everyday school life and the organizational challenges involved in implementing the concept. We would like to take this opportunity to thank both speakers for their contributions.

After a short break, Lisa Salditt (Sportjugend Region Kassel, advisor for child welfare, youth engagement and diversity in sport) presented her work and focused on the importance of child protection in sport. As more and more new all-day offers are finding their way into schools as part of a wide variety of collaborations, it is important to continuously raise awareness of this topic. Initial efforts are already being made to work together.

Finally, Florian Heussner presented the publication of ballstars 2 and explained the further developments compared to the first edition (ballstars 2). He also presented a video project in which educational videos were produced for individual forms of play that can be used in training in the future.

At the end of the meeting, Lukas Toby thanked all participants on behalf of the project team and gave an outlook on upcoming dates. The next ballstars day is planned for May 9. He also reminded everyone that ball packages can still be purchased from Erima at a reduced price via the project. Orders can be placed via lukas.toby@uni-kassel.de.