Two hundred toddlers, one gym, every Sunday

MiniMove is one of IdéeSport’s national programs: in winter, when playgrounds stop being an option, a school gym opens on Sunday and becomes a free indoor space where toddlers can run, climb and fall onto something soft, with their parents right there. No fee, no registration, no questions.

I was the project leader for the Bellinzona location. Every Sunday my team of young coaches and I turned an ordinary school gym into a landscape of mats, tunnels and climbing blocks, then spent the afternoon keeping the chaos joyful and the injuries theoretical. On the busiest mornings we hosted up to two hundred people.

The leadership part was real. The coaches were teenagers, most in their first role with responsibility, from a mix of backgrounds and ages; my job was as much coaching them as running the venue. Somebody has to hold the safety briefing, plan the setup, handle the parent with a complaint and the coach who didn’t show, and still be the person a three-year-old trusts.

Why it mattered

For plenty of families in the room, that gym was the affordable warm place on a winter Sunday, and one of the few where meeting other parents happened by default. The program’s whole theory is that movement and social exchange shouldn’t depend on income, and having watched a season of it, I’m convinced.

Also: if you can get two hundred people including toddlers through an afternoon with zero incidents, sprint planning holds few terrors.

Cover photo: Triplec85, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons; cropped.