Among pre-teens and teenagers, seeking and gaining new experiences is a natural part of their development. At the same time, adolescents often have a tendency to make impulsive decisions without thinking through the consequences of their behaviour. If adolescents’ risk-taking is not sufficiently safe, risk-taking behaviour may occur with more serious consequences.

The SPIN program is a sports-based developmental program aimed at youth aged 10-18 who have behavioural or behavioural and academic performance problems due to low self-management and/or social skills. The main premise of the program is that by developing the social and self-management skills of young people through a structured free time activity (in this case, football), various risk behaviours are prevented (academic success should improve through the accompanying effect as well). The key activity for the youth of the SPIN program includes trainings from August to June (soccer, etc. sports team games), which also include life skills sessions. During the training sessions, the coaches guide the young people on topics of social and self-management skills, which are chosen according to the needs of the group.

So far, the impact assessment of the SPIN program has been carried out in two stages during the season – information on performance indicators is collected before and after the season of the SPIN program. The indicators are then compared with each other to find out if the objectives have been met. At the same time, the change has been assessed only for those adolescents who participate in the SPIN program – the comparison group, i.e. those adolescents who do not participate in the SPIN program, has not been used.

The purpose of the work was to provide information that creates the conditions for high-quality measurement of the impact of the SPIN program in accordance with international scientific standards. For this purpose, an updated program theory was prepared for the SPIN program, two measuring instruments were validated to be used in monitoring and impact assessment in the future, and recommendations to be taken into account before the impact assessment were prepared.

In addition, a feasibility study was conducted, which assessed the applicability and acceptability of the further development of the SPIN program, SPIN+, which started in August 2022. The main difference between the two programs is that instead of football training, SPIN+ applies other sports – handball, volleyball, basketball, judo and athletics.