Three points for Oldenburg girls' football

The starting shot was fired around 15 years ago in the north of Oldenburg. The ball is now rolling all over Germany. We are talking about the integrative girls' football project "Mädchen kicken mit". Chancellor Angela Merkel has now honoured it personally.

Chancellor Angela Merkel today presented the Pastorenweg primary school (Bremen-Gröpelingen) with the German Football Association's 2011 Mercedes-Benz Integration Award in the school category. Second place went to IGS Flötenteich/GS Nadorst (Oldenburg) and third place to the Anne Frank School (Lüneburg-Kaltenmoor). All three prizewinners are part of the football integration project "MICK-Mädchen kicken mit" (MICK girls kick along), which is run by the University of Oldenburg's affiliated Institute "Integration through Sport and Education".

The three award-winning projects clearly show how integrative the idea of girls' football is, emphasised Prof. Dr Babette Simon, President of the University of Oldenburg. "It is a high level of recognition that shows how effective and valuable the Oldenburg concept can be for integration."

Oldenburg sports educator Dr Ulf Gebken developed the concept in the north of Oldenburg together with others around 15 years ago - "under difficult conditions", according to Gebken, who now heads the affiliated Institute "Integration through Sport and Education" together with Prof. Dr Rudolf Leiprecht. "That's why I'm particularly pleased that the Oldenburg schools IGS Fötenteich and Grundschule Nadorst were selected for the award."

Gebken set up football clubs at primary schools to get girls with a migration background interested in sport. Shortly afterwards, the first school tournaments were organised and project members trained young women to become football assistants. With success: today, the ball is rolling in 150 primary schools across Germany and more than 1,200 migrant girls play football regularly. Their share in the football clubs is around 73 per cent. Many trained young female football assistants help out in the school and club groups, and more than 80 per cent of the group leaders are female.

"Just a few years ago, nobody would have thought it possible that so many girls with Turkish, Eastern European or Arabic roots would be passionate about football," says Gebken. "The decisive factor was that we were able to win over the schools with our confidence-building framework and start girls' football clubs with predominantly female coaches."

The integration prize is not the first award for the model project: in 2010, the Oldenburg sports educator Gebken already received the Lower Saxony Integration Prize, the "Stars of Sport" award from the German Olympic Sports Confederation and a "best-practice" award at the integration summit in the Federal Chancellery.