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Sharing Best practices: UNISPORT ITALIA provides a valuable guide to orient athletes who intend to undertake an academic training in Italy in universities that take into account the European guidelines on the dual career of the athlete.

UNISPORT ITALIA, the network of the Italian national university sports system created in 2018 to enhance the role of sport within the three key missions of the university (training, research and innovation), actively cooperates with EAS in the implementation of the dual career in Italy. UNISPORT ITALIA developed the first shared database on dual career in Italy (https://www.unisport-italia.it/dual-career/) as an important result of the Memorandum of Understanding on dual career with the National Olympic Committee (CONI) and its Athletes Commission.

The UNISPORT ITALIA dual career database not only provides information for athletes willing to pursue a university career in parallel with their sports commitment but offers also national and international visibility to 28 Italian Universities with a dual career programme, stimulating other Universities to start or implement a dual career program.

Data collection was made possible thanks to the contribution of the Sports Delegates of the Italian universities who filled out an electronic questionnaire and the support of the Conference of Italian University Rectors. Thus, the UNISPORT ITALIA website allows to filter the available programme on the basis of the main benefits provided for by the regulations of the individual universities, thus allowing athletes to easily identify the programme most suited to their needs. The mapping will be constantly updated by UNISPORT ITALIA.

Full satisfaction on the part of the President of Unisport Italia, Prof. Paolo Bouquet: “This result demonstrates that the Italian university world is paying more and more attention to the relationship with the world of sports, feeding a virtuous and bidirectional synergy: on the one hand, more and more Italian universities support student-athletes in their difficult path, on the other hand, the world of sport and athletes can help the national university system to carry out its training activities ever better and in innovative forms, research and technology transfer. I wish that this project can give rise to a working table with the Sports Office of the Government, CONI (Italian National Olympic Committee), CUSI (Italian Sport University Centre) and all other stakeholders to define national guidelines to dual career as suggested by the EU, we would be one of the first countries to equip ourselves with a fundamental tool”.