Today we spoke to Steven Beharall, who is the competition manager for Newcastle School Sport Partnership. He outlined how they are using Active throughout their SSP and also his views on it from the point of view of a Competition Manager.

How does Newcastle SSP use Active?

They use it as part of their Primary Schools Intervention strategy to target schools in the Newcastle area that are falling below the 41% competition participation average in order to raise that statistic to 60% and over.

What competitions are being set?

One of the PESSYP questions this year raised the issue of how regularly competitions were taking place.  When using Active to target a failing school, Steve buying online drugs sets a virtual competition for skipping consisting of 3 rounds (1 minute of skipping per round).  The highest score was then taken to be representative of the school’s overall score in both Intra and Inter school competitions in one go.  Using Active for the skipping competition solves several issues that failing schools often have with competitive sports:

  • Cost of equipment
  • Cost of travel
  • Teachers that do not have the skills to supervise

With these competitions:

  • All you need is a timer and a skipping rope
  • You can do it within school grounds, during your own schedule
  • Any teacher can supervise

What about the future?

Although Steve emphasizes that he doesn’t want to see school sports taking a departure from the social, interactive side of competitive sports, he also insists that ‘virtual competitions are the only truly sustainable type of competition’, because it breaks down so many barriers for the following reasons:

  • You can buy the package as a whole
  • There are no transport costs
  • There are no organisational costs
  • Virtual competitions reach out to people that are marginalized by traditional forms of competitive sports

Widening Participation

Steve is also involved with the Tyne and Wear Disability Sports Forum.  He sees virtual competition as the perfect means to get students with disabilities involved with sports, especially students who are in attendance at mainstream schools and are not given the time and resources to take part at grass-roots level.

Not only do virtual competitions create an easier, high quality way to participate, they also create opportunities for those that might not have been given the chance before. Virtual competition software such as Active can break down so many of the traditional barriers that conventional competitive sports can present.