SAFETENNIS — launched in Oslo

§ 1On 16 February the SAFETENNIS consortium met in Oslo for the kick-off of an Erasmus+ Sport Cooperation Partnership. SAFETENNIS — Safeguarding European Tennis: Building a Safer Future — runs over two years and addresses, in plain terms, a question the sector has spent too long deferring: how do we ensure tennis environments at every level are safe, ethical and accountable, and do so by design rather than after an incident.

§ 2The work is structural, not symbolic. The consortium will strengthen safeguarding governance within European tennis, build the institutional capacity of federations, clubs and tournament organisers, and produce an evidence-based safeguarding training manual. Practical toolkits and online learning modules will be tailored to the stakeholder groups who actually need them — coaches, club managers, parents, tournament directors. Pilots in the participating countries will run the materials in real conditions; the evaluation will tell us which parts work and which parts need rewriting.

§ 3Collective Innovation coordinates the project from Oslo. The federations of Turkey, Lithuania, Hungary and Romania carry the work into their respective ecosystems; The Hague University of Applied Sciences brings the academic rigour. The International Tennis Federation and Tennis Europe are involved strategically, which underlines that safeguarding is not a national concern dressed up as a European one — it is a structural responsibility at every level of the game.

§ 4For us, the project reflects a wider responsibility. Sport organisations and academic institutions are not only responsible for performance pathways. We are equally responsible for ensuring that the environments in which performance is pursued are safe, ethical and accountable. The next twenty-four months will move SAFETENNIS from research to implementation, from frameworks to practice, and from awareness to the kind of structural change that does not have to be re-argued every season.