Dual European Careers of Athletes Project. A guide for Professional Basketball Players
In recent years, Erasmus+ projects have been an excellent academic platform that are helping to achieve one of the great founding principles of the European Union: the integration of its member states through cultural, social and knowledge exchange. The DECA project - Dual European Careers of Athletes, part of an ambitious idea and unquestionable potential, the union of sports and work careers of young players in a professional context. The Dual Career has been set as one of the great European sporting horizons for the coming years. Until a few years ago, the professional and academic careers of athletes were presumed to be separate realities. When an elite athlete retired permanently, in many cases the future that lay ahead was not very encouraging. Over time, there has been a growing awareness of the need to support athletes in their academic training and create positive synergies that allow a parallel development of both paths. The DECA project goes one step further in this philosophy, putting the focus on young basketball players, with their sports careers still in the making. That is, to bet on the model of the dual career from the base, establishing a solid foundation that supports this model of educational and sports development. The importance of Universities, clubs, sports associations and govern- ment institutions having taken part in this project is categorical. The presence of these organizations is a source of guarantees for the project to be executed in a controlled scenario where the main actors –the athletes– can achieve their goals with support and certainty. This book seeks to set a precedent in the dual career of young basketball players that can be applied to any sporting context. In this work the main lines of execution of the project are described in detail; the role played by each of the partners involved; the strategies of publicity and dissemination of its contents; the assessment and evaluation methods used; testimoniesof the participating subjects and the compilation of the good ...
