Six months in, I-PLAY has documented 12 traditional games across 3 countries and scheduled a training of trainers in Türkiye. Our honest review.
We are 6 months into I-PLAY's 18, and we already have 12 traditional games documented across 3 countries and a training of trainers scheduled in Türkiye for September. This is our honest review: what we have done, what we have learnt and what comes next.
What we have completed: six months, dated milestones
We report our progress with days and months, not adjectives. This is what was completed between February and July 2026.
12 and 13 March 2026 — Kick-off meeting in Donostia/San Sebastián, with the teams from ABARKA ONGD (Spain), BIGA GELİŞİM SPOR KULÜBÜ (Türkiye) and STOWARZYSZENIE SEDA (Poland), and a working visit to Kroma in Errenteria.
April 2026 — Transnational State of the Art report, consolidated by SEDA from three national reports. Its conclusion: the problem is not a lack of cultural awareness, but the absence of systemic integration and practical implementation of traditional games within formal structures.
12 game sheets completed in English, four per country. Each sheet covers cultural and historical context, step-by-step instructions, safety notes, learning outcomes and inclusive adaptations for people with disabilities, migrants and gender.
April and May 2026 — Dissemination and Communication Plan (April, updated in July) and Quality and Evaluation Plan v.1 (May), plus a completed Risk Management Plan and an operational dashboard for tasks, indicators, dissemination and finances.
July 2026 — The project's first newsletter, following a feature in the PAL Network newsletter on 28 May 2026.
On top of this comes the less visible work that underpins everything: bilateral agreements signed with SEDA and BIGA in March 2026, and online consortium coordination meetings on 4 May, 25 May and 16 June 2026.
What we have learnt: three concrete lessons
Coordinating in three languages takes longer than it seems. We work in Spanish, Polish and Turkish, and produce in English. We made English the working language for the game sheets and kept translation for local dissemination, rather than trying to do both at once.
Shared templates are quick to draft and slow to validate. Agreeing on the training curriculum template and the game content template was quick: they were fixed on 22 April and 20 May 2026. Getting twelve sheets from three different traditions to fit the same format took rounds of comments between partners at the May meetings, and cross-review of the content is scheduled for August 2026.
Local work has to be prepared months in advance. The visit to Kroma in Errenteria during the kick-off meeting taught us that a community day starts being built long before the event itself: through conversations, shared materials and a local organisation that knows people by their first names.
What comes next: from September to 2027
The next milestone has a date and a venue. From 7 to 11 September 2026 we hold the training of trainers in Biga (Çanakkale, Türkiye), hosted by BIGA GELİŞİM, with five participants per organisation and local participants from Biga, over three intensive working days.
This will feed the training content for the multilingual digital toolkit and for the project platform, already online at i-play.abarka.org, whose training centre and games library will fill up over the course of 2026 and 2027.
Then comes the most visible part: hour-and-a-half online training workshops, three-day traditional sports festivals in the three countries between October 2026 and April 2027, and work on policy recommendations so that traditional games stop being a cultural curiosity and become part of educational and sporting pathways.
How to take part
Discover the 12 documented games and ask us for the sheets to use in your school, club or youth organisation.
Suggest a traditional game from your area that deserves to be documented and adapted.
Host a workshop or a sports day in your neighbourhood or town, with our support on the design.
Spread the word by sharing the newsletter and the posts on ABARKA ONGD's social media.
What we take away from these six months
An 18-month project should be judged not by what it promises, but by what it can already show in month 6. We have 12 games written up, quality and dissemination plans in place and an international training event confirmed.
Share our first newsletter and follow ABARKA ONGD at https://linktr.ee/abarkaongd to join us for the second half of the journey.