August Reflections: Better Questions, Bigger Pictures

A Room in Gothenburg

The FOCUS project reached a significant moment this month. After months of gathering research and learning from the experiences of young dual-career footballers across Sweden, Finland, and Latvia, the partnership came together for the second Transnational Project Meeting in Gothenburg.

The meeting was deliberately designed as a learning space. Rather than arriving at answers, the aim was for partners to experience co-creation for themselves, work with real athlete narratives, and question their own interpretations. On the second day, coaches, educators, and club staff joined the process. Watching how different people interpreted the same story differently was one of the most revealing parts.

"It is very easy within European projects to become focused on activities, deliverables and deadlines. All of those things matter, but they are not the reason we do the work. Behind the research are young people trying to manage football, education, expectations, relationships, pressure and decisions about their futures."

Lucy

For those of us in the room, the value was not just in the content but in what the process revealed about collaboration itself.

"Everyone brings their own experiences, perspectives and ways of working, and when those are brought together in the right environment, they can really strengthen what we are creating."

Geri

The TPM feeds directly into what comes next: National Co-Creation Workshops across Sweden, Finland, and Latvia, where a wider range of stakeholders will explore dual-career realities within their own contexts.

Doors Opening

Beyond FOCUS, August brought a growing sense of momentum across the organisation. Conversations with clubs, sporting organisations, and people working within elite sport are beginning to move NYSA into spaces where we have something genuinely important to contribute. These are not conversations about performance in isolation. They are about player care, safeguarding, transition, wellbeing, and the wider development of young athletes.

Alongside this, two new EU applications were successful, and the groundwork laid over the past year in Africa is beginning to turn into tangible opportunities. The possibility of delivering work across African contexts next year, particularly around young people, athlete development, and safeguarding, is one of the most exciting things on the horizon.

"Much of leadership involves holding things that are unfinished. Conversations that have not yet become partnerships. Ideas that have not yet become projects. This month has reminded me that part of leadership is also recognising when the conditions for something new are beginning to emerge."

Emma

Closer to home, the Ambassador Programme is launching. It is something the team has been developing for a while, and moving from planning into practice brings its own kind of energy. The programme will give young people the opportunity to represent NYSA through their sports and studies while gaining experience and development along the way.

Making Complexity Accessible

While FOCUS moved into its next phase, another EU project approached its conclusion. FAITH in the Future of Sports is in its final stage, and one of its biggest remaining deliverables is the FAITH Handbook, a practical resource for coaches, facilitators, and sport organisations across Europe. What looked like a straightforward layout task turned into something much deeper: the challenge of making a lot of valuable knowledge feel approachable rather than overwhelming.

"Design isn't just about making something look nice. It's about making information easier to understand."

Yoana

That same challenge has been showing up in the ongoing rebuild of the NYSA Sweden website. Trying to communicate what NYSA does, clearly and honestly, when the work itself is genuinely complex, has been one of the hardest parts of the build. The pages that take the longest are not the ones with the most information but the ones where the language has to do the most work.

"There is so much happening across different projects, sports, people and areas that it can feel impossible to capture in a single description. Every page I build, I am trying to hold the full picture without flattening it into a tagline. That tension never fully goes away, but I think it is the right tension to sit with."

Vala

Leonarda, who has been exploring the Cynefin framework and its relevance to NYSA, arrived at a similar conclusion:

"Perhaps the difficulty of describing NYSA is just a reflection of the complexity of what we are trying to do. This has made me think more about how we communicate what NYSA is without reducing it to something much narrower than it is."

Leonarda

Flowing, Not Forcing

A thread running through many of these reflections is the tension between the instinct to organise and the need to stay open. In project management, in design, in leadership, in how we support people, the same lesson kept surfacing: sometimes the best thing to do is resist the urge to solve immediately and instead create the conditions for something better to emerge.

"I think of NYSA as a river, following the current, shifting as we encounter rocks, changing environments and unexpected adventures. This environment is teaching me to release some of my need for control and is challenging me to grow in creative thinking, problem-solving and collaborative solution-finding."

Chris

That learning is showing up in how the team works with each other, too. August brought visible growth across the organisation. People taking on new responsibilities, contributing ideas, supporting interns, and becoming more confident in roles that do not always have neat boundaries.

"Sometimes the best support is not providing the answer immediately, but giving someone enough direction and confidence to find their own way forward."

Geri

Into September