Club Resources
Clubs provide enormous community and social benefits. They also have a responsibility to offer a fair, safe and equitable sporting environment. When running a club, it is important to consider and enforce codes of conduct, risk management strategies and member protection guidelines to ensure everyone has a fun, safe and inclusive experience.
Member Protection– Does your club Play by the Rules?
Member protection is about ensuring policies and procedures that support safe and fair behaviour are in place, and that members are aware of a complaints procedure if breaches or offences occur. SRV supports a range of initiatives to ensure this occurs, including the interactive website Play by the Rules.
Sports Injury Prevention
Sport and recreation participation has a number of benefits, including the enhancement of physical and mental health. However, sports-related injuries may limit or reduce the benefits obtained from participation.
Promoting and assisting the delivery of safer sport and active recreation is an important part of encouraging lifelong physical activity.
Sport and Recreation Victoria provides funding for research and evidence based information development and related promotional activities under the Sports Injury Prevention Research Grants Initiative. Read more about the outcomes from the Initiative (PDF 146 kb).
Smartplay
Smartplay was formed in 1998 through an agreement between the Department of Human Services, Sport and Recreation Victoria and VicHealth. It is currently funded in Victoria by VicHealth and Sport and Recreation Victoria. The program is managed and delivered by Sports Medicine Australia - Victorian Branch.
Smartplay's mission is to assist in reducing the frequency and severity of injury associated with sport and active recreation activity in Victoria. The program facilitates injury prevention practices to foster safer and more supportive environments for physical activity, through a range of communications and policy development based strategies.
Public Liability Insurance
The Victorian Government is working to ensure community organisations can access Public Liability Insurance to enable them to undertake their activities with appropriate cover in place.
Risk Management
The single biggest initiative that sports can adopt to reduce their insurance premiums is to have an effective risk management program, including policies to mitigate risk, throughout all levels of their sport.
In response to insurance-related issues impacting on the sport and recreation industry, the Victorian Government funded a four year sports risk management initiative. The projects supported under this initiative were:
- The Vicsport Risk Management Training
- The Vicsport Risk Indentifier Tool
- The University of Ballarat - Risk Management Evaluation Project (PDF 289kb)
- A web based sports risk management resource centre
- The Vicsport Risk Management Standards Project (standards were developed for eight sports: hockey, volleyball, squash, basketball, badminton, football [soccer], netball and lacrosse)
User Friendly Sport
There are many steps that sport and recreation clubs can take to be more user-friendly to a wider range of people.
User Friendly sport - An ideas book to help sport and recreation clubs grow includes:
- examples of how to keep existing members and attract new ones by drawing on the experience of other clubs
- a model code of conduct for parents, players, spectators and coaches
- tips on how to prevent unsporting behaviour