Peter Wiese grew up volunteering. He started judo at the age of five with the Bördetigern in Wanzleben (Saxony-Anhalt). “My neighbor, who was about the same age, was doing judo there and taking me to training. He stopped pretty quickly, I’ve stuck with it to this day,” he says with a smile.
At the Bördertigern he got to know a very good mixture of committed coaches with a good understanding of judo, a lot of club life and a high level of competition motivation. “This enabled me to learn good judo and was also quite successful in competitions at state level. It even went so far that when I was 14 I went to the sports boarding school in Halle (Saale) for a year. But there I noticed that competitive sport is not really my thing and I would rather do “normal” judo again.” At 18 he went to North Rhine-Westphalia to study and started training at the Velberter JC there. Here, too, he found a very good club environment with many people his age and weight. Thanks to the good training in Velbert, he also took part in the men’s DEM in Duisburg in 2017.
“But my path as a volunteer goes back to the Bördetigers in Wanzleben,” he likes to remember when he first started out in judo. The association wrote youth participation very big, without it being immediately pointed out to everyone. All young people were involved in the club activities, were allowed to help out early on in the care of the younger club members at holiday camps, club festivals and competitions and were encouraged to try their hand as referees and trainers.
From this commitment in the clubs, he came into the volunteer structures of the DJB via the DJB junior team. “I was at the first junior team meeting in Eisenach in 2011 and was immediately enthusiastic about the junior team idea.” In 2015 he was then elected federal youth spokesman. This enabled him to take on a little more responsibility in the junior team and gain initial experience with the federal youth leadership and the youth general assembly. “When I was then asked in 2018 whether I would like to be elected for the position of deputy youth leader, that was just the next logical step for me to take on more responsibility for the junior team and other tasks related to the topic of volunteering .”
“My election as federal youth leader this year, on the other hand, came as a surprise. Norbert Specker informed us shortly before the youth assembly that he would like to resign and asked me if I would take over. It was clear to me that I was following in big footsteps here, but I still find the task very exciting.”
After almost three years of the pandemic and even before that, declining membership numbers, the youth leadership currently has no easy task to tackle. For Peter Wiese, the most important area is currently the support, promotion and further training of the many voluntary trainers, exercise leaders, youth leaders and others. “These people do incredibly important grassroots work and are often the reason why children and young people come to judo and stay with judo.”
In the area of support, he primarily sees offers, measures and best-practice examples that must be given to the trainers. He sees the judo safaris in the zoo as a good example of a low-threshold offer for clubs to be able to offer activities for their club during the summer holidays. “We also need a store of ideas into which trainers can enter their good ideas and be inspired by other ideas and projects. Not everyone has to keep reinventing the wheel,” he tries to bundle and pass on the experiences of the trainers. He would also like to include digital methods for further training offers so that they can be used without planning another weekend for judo.
“Another point that we are currently tackling as the federal youth leadership is the reorganization of the team competitions in youth. Here the existing formats have to be reconciled with the reality of the heterogeneous club landscape.” A working group has already been formed and a club survey carried out for this purpose. Hopefully the first results of this working group will be available this year.
