Doing sports together: CSV Emilia’s “cure”
“ As a doctor, I like to recall a quote from Patch Adams: ‘When you treat a disease, you may win or lose. When you care for a person, you always win.’ Well, during these years of collaboration, we have often won.” With these words, Gianni Zobbi, Director of Sports Medicine at the AUSL-IRCCS of Reggio Emilia, describes All Inclusive Sport, the project launched by the Volunteer Service Centre CSV Emilia in 2016 in the province of Reggio Emilia — now expanded to Parma and Piacenza — which works to restore the right to sport for children and young people with disabilities or neurodivergence.
CSV Emilia’s mission is to build an ever-wider network of volunteering initiatives serving local communities and citizens, helping to reduce the barriers faced by the most vulnerable people. So that no one is left behind. We all know that sport is essential for the psycho-physical, cognitive, and relational development of children and adolescents. It helps counter youth distress, promotes social inclusion, fosters relationships with teammates and coaches, and creates a profound sense of belonging to a community. It supports emotional and physical development, increases self-esteem, and strengthens self-determination.
The CSV Emilia team is fully aware that, for boys and girls with disabilities, inclusive sport has an even greater value, as it represents one of the few extracurricular opportunities to spend time in a peer group, interact with other children and teenagers, and improve their skills. For this reason, together with associations, sports organisations, and the local health authority, and with the support of local institutions, ten years ago it created All Inclusive Sport: a unique project in Italy that allows minors with disabilities to choose their favourite sport and practice it in the afternoon alongside peers without disabilities.
How does it work? Every training session is supported by specially trained inclusion tutors working alongside coaches, at no additional cost either to families or to sports clubs. In this way, for the past decade All Inclusive Sport has guaranteed children and young people with disabilities the opportunity to play sports after school in equal and mixed teams.
In the 2025/26 school year, All Inclusive Sport is supporting around 250 children and teenagers across approximately one hundred sports associations, with the help of more than 60 tutors and 6 senior tutors, in over 20 different sports disciplines.
Recently, the University of Parma and the Sports Medicine Unit of AUSL Reggio Emilia carried out a pilot study entitled The Effects of a Sport-Based Training Programme on Reaction Time and Fine Motor Coordination in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder. The analysis identified improvements in reaction time and fine motor coordination among autistic children. These findings support the importance of including autistic children in inclusive sport-based training programmes, which not only encourage the development of motor skills but also promote socialisation.1
It often happens that children and teenagers with disabilities who join sports associations through All Inclusive Sport are eventually able, after a few years, to continue their journey independently, no longer needing tutor support. This is a sign of profound transformation: coaches and teammates grow together with them, learning how to build a truly inclusive environment.
“As the Volunteer Service Centre CSV Emilia, we immediately felt that All Inclusive Sport needed to be capable of weaving relationships and creating new networks, in order to reach even those narrow spaces where often no one else could get,” explains Eugenia Marè, coordinator of All Inclusive Sport for CSV Emilia. “Our choice, therefore, was to work on community relationships without seeking the spotlight.”
Every day, All Inclusive Sport works to generate cultural change and foster a more inclusive community in which everyone can value their abilities and find their own role. It does this not only through sport, but also in schools and companies. In fact, All Inclusive Sport organises Community Team Building activities for employees of the companies supporting the project, aimed at strengthening skills related to welcoming and valuing diversity, useful both professionally and personally.
Through role-playing, psychomotor, and exploratory activities — in collaboration with expert educators and Paralympic athletes — participants are encouraged to confront cultural prejudices linked to disability that they are often unaware of, while also developing transferable skills that help them adapt to constantly changing environments.
As Eugenia Marè states: “The inclusion of a child or young person with a disability within a peer group should not be showcased or emphasised, but normalised. The dream of All Inclusive Sport is simple: that one day, doing sport together will no longer be newsworthy. That it will simply be natural. That it will belong to everyone.”
- The results were published by MDPI, an academic publishing house specialising in peer-reviewed journals. A second study will follow in January 2027. ↩︎