Sport and Thought, Football as Therapy

S&T has been running for 7 years as a project and is now in its 5th year as an organisation. Set up by psychodynamic therapist Daniel Smyth in response to spiralling youth violence, social exclusion and school exclusion amongst young people within inner London. S&T believes how one presents within a sporting environment is no different to a societal, thus sport can be used to begin to understand our internal psychological difficulties through playing. What a child will see as a technical sporting progression, is that, but is brought about by a more thoughtful contained mind, as the mind control the feet, hands etc, not the other way around. S&T has taken the traditional therapeutic consulting room and placed it on a football pitch. All training is psychologically underpinned to enable the student to understand what drives both their sporting behaviour and their life behaviour as the internal catalysts are the same. The main objective of the programme is to ensure at risk adolescents remain in school. The project currently runs in London, Northern Ireland, the republic of Ireland and within the UK prison system. We have 7 years of experience of working within the inner city with at risk adolescents using sport to enable internal and external change in the individual. We are experienced in working in the most difficult settings, in prisons, pupil referral units and in Northern Ireland across divided communities. Daniel Smyth our founder is a psychodynamic therapist whose work has been recognised at UK governmental level and who is a respected authority on using sport as therapy. All staff are licensed Football coaches. All staff are vastly experienced youth workers, working with high risk adolescents involved in gangs, anti-social behaviour and experiencing mental health difficulties. S&T is currently partner in EU-funded project titled “Let’s Play Together LEPYTER” (590325-EPP-1-2017-1-IT-SPO-SSCP); the project objective is to promote equal access to sport and promote social inclusion through sport in urban areas; partnerships made by 4 organisations from Milan, Berlin, Madrid and London. We are also coordinator of a second project funded by Erasmus+ KA2: ESY – Easy Scholl for Young Students (2017-3-UK01-KA), which aims at sharing promising practices in prevention of early school leaving and improving learning performance of students at risk of leaving school early. The partnership is composed by 4 organizations form 4 EU countries (UK, Portugal, Greece and Italy).