eSport activities by Pontevecchio Bologna

E-Sport Community League: Pontevecchio Bologna efforts and results

E-Sport Community League project aimed to encourage participation in real sport and physical activity for children who prefer playing online games. That was our first experience in E-sports. Above all we are very satisfied it about it.

We used an innovative methodology: we organized a tournament in which the children could become champions of FIFA videogame only if they also participated in a real football in our multisport club. The focus of this project was also to improve physical sport activities for children who prefer playing online games above sport, and the result was largely positive.

Polisportiva Pontevecchio Bologna started in 2021 to organize meetings to introduce E-sport besides the other sports, with the focus of the importance about healthy lifestyle and physical activities. In particular we organized a dissemination event during the presentation meeting for 2022 summer special weeks on March 23rd, 2022.

Therefore, in summer 2022 we decided to introduce E-sports in our “summer special weeks”, dedicate to sport and socialization. So, from June 13th to 24th 2022, in a beautiful park in Bologna we organized the Football E-sport Special Weeks. The program consisted of a daylong football and educational activities. 2 Target groups: 6-9 and 10-13 years old. Every week 60 young athletes participated. In the morning they had football training and in the afternoon a FIFA Tournament Took part on PlayStation. We decided to play in pairs, for supporting team building skills. The trainers organized parallel skills tournament on the grass field, adding the “digital” points to the “real field” points. It was an outstanding sportive and educational experience.

Results:

  • Young athletes experienced videogames as a sport for the first time
  • The club enriched the summer camps’ activities catalogue (to be repeated in 2023)
  • Some young people decided to enroll in the summer camps because we had a unique selling proposition consisting of eSport

Our goal for the future is to improve eSport activities in our club and keep caring of the educational side of the virtual sport, which by the way is our mission in the sport career of our grassroot athletes.