Soccer Smoking & Prevention

Athlete Recipes

Soccer Recipes

. Request free tickets to the stadium event for your state health department or organization volunteers and key community members, or distribute the tickets in a drawing at other health department or organization events. If You Don't Have a Professional Team . Find physicians and certified athletic trainers to take part in your state health department or organization activities by going through athletic departments of high school or col­lege athletic programs. . Check with your local youth soccer league or YMCA sports program for allied health care professionals who might be willing to help emphasize the negative health effects of tobac­co use. This individual could also talk with kids about how their athlet­ic performance will be negatively affected. . Find a hospital with a sports medicine clinic or a physical rehabilitation divi­sion, and ask if they know any physi­cians or certified athletic trainers who might be interested in taking part in your activity or event.

The Tobacco-Free Sports Playbook xxiii

Evaluate To Stay On Track Before you start your tobacco-free sports program, be sure to set up a plan to see how your program is oper­ating and what effects it is producing. With this information, you can strengthen your program and increase its effectiveness and impact over time. What you discover through evaluations can help you influence the people who allocate funds and set policies. These findings also show elected officials, policymakers, and others who are interested in your program's success that you are accountable. To help you conduct good evaluations, the CDC offers technical assistance to state health departments and pro­vides a wealth of information that you can access on the Internet (see www.cdc.gov/eval). Summarized next are the six steps recommended in the CDC's Framework for Program Evaluation in Public Health: . Step 1. Engage stakeholders. Stakeholders are the various organi­zations and people who care about your evaluation findings and who have a stake in how those findings will be used. This can include people involved in program operations (managers, staff, partners, funding agencies, and coalition members); those served or affected by the pro­gram (parents, teachers, coaches, athletes, advocacy groups, elected officials); and primary users of the findings who will make decisions about the program (funding agen­cies, coalition members, and taxpay­ers). Make these people your partners every step of the way- early on as you are developing the evaluation and throughout the process. Find out what matters to them and what their needs are. Diverse perspectives can then be taken into account when the evalua­tion is developed and when the find­ings are analyzed, interpreted, and used. Some programs involve these various organizations and people by forming an evaluation team, which is made up of program staff, external people, and possibly consultants who are experts in evaluation. One person usually serves as the lead evaluator. (See Finding a Good Evaluator, page xxviii.) xxiv The Tobacco-Free Sports Playbook

. Step 2. Describe the program. Begin by describing the need for your program: What is the problem you are targeting? How is it affecting your community? How big is this problem overall and in various popu­lation segments? Who is your target group? What changes or trends are occurring? Next, indicate the results you expect the program to produce. Be sure to include immediate, inter­mediate, and long-term benefits as well as your program objectives. (See SMART Objectives, page xxvi.) Also make sure that your local objectives are linked to state and national tobacco-control objectives (the Healthy People 2010 tobacco-control objectives are available at www.health.gov/healthypeople). Describe your program's various activities, indicate how they relate to each other, and link them to your program goals. Indicate the resources needed to conduct the program (money, staff, time, materi­als, and equipment). Indicate your program's stage of development. Is it in the planning stages, is it being implemented, or is it a mature pro­gram that's producing effects? Describe the environment in which your program operates. Identify any influences-such as social, economi­cal, political, or geographical-that might affect your program. The CDC also recommends that you draft a flow chart (see logic model example below) that shows how your program activities logically lead to the desired outcomes. . Step 3. Focus the evaluation design. Decide the purpose of your evaluation: What questions will you ask? How will you get the answers? What will you do with the informa­tion? How will you share the find­ings? Decide what type of evaluation you use. Process evaluations (con­ducted throughout a program's dura­tion) assess how the program is operating-What activities are taking place? Who is conducting the activi­ties? Who is reached? Are resources being allocated as planned? What