“triathlonkids.de” is a community of about 30 child athletes and six trainers which is part of a bigger triathlon department itself organized in a much bigger sports association (Turnverein Heitersheim e.V.) with about 1,000 members in nine sports groups.
On the 9th of May 2020, many of the COVID-19 regulations for sports in Germany were relaxed after many weeks in force. However, complying with the statutory requirements presents a challenge, while of course being very necessary for a successful test and trace programme.
A team of five coaches started to create an execution plan for triathlon training with children between 3-15 years old, to conform with the COVID-19 regulations, recommendations and publications of several national and federal state associations such as the Deutscher Olympischer Sportbund (DOSB – the German Olympic Sport Association). Local conditions had to be considered and the requisite evidence provided that compliant processes were properly planned.
After submitting three revisions of the planning document they received the official approval from the authorities on the 18th of May 2020, and started the first training under the COVID-19 regulatory regime on the 22nd of May.
Before training starts the “kids“ and their parents can use a booking tool for sessions – www.calsy.eu – built and provided by the sponsor ConsSys IT AG for free. For the training itself it is required to show for each session:
- if each child checked-in,
- if any have symptoms of Covid-19,
- a signed acceptance by the responsible supervisor.
To meet their needs, the Tri-Team Turnverein Heitersheim use the cloud-based collaboration platform Vmoso which they had introduced to their community in February 2020, and which was already in the process of a step-by-step roll-out.
The alternative solution would have been to use a printed list out of CalSy and manually recording the required information, which would have been more prone to error and to data loss, and slower for extracting information for contact tracing if it were required.
Why is Vmoso the better solution? Using the project task feature of Vmoso allows them to split each training class into a single project task, each representing one of three age classes. Within each task commentary, they insert the table for each session to automatically record the necessary data items plus a column to manage sub-groups. These sub-groups create the means of organizing training groups so as to limit each of them to a maximum of five children (as required by the COVID-19 regulations).
In this way there is flexibility to change the list on demand (to accommodate absentees or unregistered attendees) at check-in time. A record of the responsible supervisor and timestamp is created automatically and to provide full compliance for all stakeholders (internally and externally).
If someone is later found to have the virus, it provides the means very easily to allow permission-based sharing of the data to the local health authority for contact-tracing purposes. The records provide a full audit trail of all contacts, group changes and other required data. Naturally, everyone hopes that there won ’t be a situation that arises to make it necessary to invoke that function but it is good to know how quickly and easily can be done if required.
