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More than 50 percent of the German participants in the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris are either studying or have already completed their studies. The dual burden of studying while pursuing a career in elite sports brings with it challenges for athletes, such as longer study times, lower grades and less work experience.

To ease this double burden, the Olympian and entrepreneur Klaus Greinert and his family established the sports scholarship at the University of Mannheim as early as 2009. The latest development of the funding program, which is unique in Germany in this form, was announced on September 12, 2024 at the Bildungscampus Heilbronn: In a symbolic signing, the Heilbronn universities – the TUM Campus Heilbronn, the DHBW Heilbronn, the DHBW CAS and the Heilbronn University of Applied Sciences – the Dieter Schwarz Foundation and the Rhine-Neckar Metropolitan Region Scholarship for Top-Class Athletes (SSMRN) sealed their partnership in promoting dual careers combining studies and top-class sports.

Dieter Schwarz Foundation enables funding program

In the future, scholarship holders at the Heilbronn universities will also receive individual organizational and financial support, for example in the form of tutorials to prepare for exams and a monthly financial allowance. In addition, the new high-performance sports representative of the Heilbronn universities will be available to them during their studies as a direct point of contact for comprehensive organizational support.

The representatives of the Heilbronn universities – Prof. Nicole Graf (Rector of DHBW Heilbronn), Prof. Boris Alexander Kühnle (Director of DHBW CAS), Prof. Oliver Lenzen (Rector of HHN) and Daniel Gottschald (Managing Director of “Die TUM Campus Heilbronn gGmbH”) – are very pleased about the new funding opportunities provided by the scholarship. All of them assured the student athletes at their university of the best possible support. Particular emphasis was placed on the commitment of the Dieter Schwarz Foundation, which makes this funding program possible at the Heilbronn universities.

“I am delighted that top athletes at the universities in Heilbronn are now also supported in their daily balancing act between studying and top-class sport by a scholarship,” says Silke Lohmiller, Director of the Education Division at the Dieter Schwarz Foundation.

TUM has been promoting top-class sports for over 20 years

For the TUM, promoting top-class sports is familiar territory: for over 20 years, the university has been working with the Bavarian Olympic Training Center as a “partner university for top-class sport”. “The TUM tries to support its top athletes by providing them with individual advice on how to organize their studies. In addition, a mentoring program or separate examination dates are offered and an extension of the studies is possible,” says Prof. Dr. Ansgar Schwirtz, TUM’s top-level sports representative. After all, there are numerous parallels between top-level sport and top-level research: ”In both cases, you have to train or research very extensively and work in a very targeted manner. Performance usually depends on an idea, one’s own conviction and creativity, and the ability to perform to the point.”

When the contract was signed, Daniel Gottschald, Managing Director of “Die TUM Campus Heilbronn gGmbH”, explained why TUM Campus Heilbronn also supports the initiative: 80 percent of the students at the campus come from abroad. Integrating them all as well as possible in Germany is a huge task: “Sport is a very important and unifying tool for this.” Gottschald hopes that the scholarship “will attract top athletes from whom we can learn something – not only top performance, but also how to deal with failure in the right way.” If it is possible to attract top athletes from all over the world to Germany and get them to study here, it will strengthen Germany as a center of science and research.

116 universities are involved

The scholarship is based on the “Partner University for Top-Level Sport” cooperation agreement, which has existed since 1999 between the German University Sports Federation (ADH), the regional Olympic training centres and the respective partner university. Currently, 116 universities in Germany are part of this agreement. With the introduction of the scholarship, all universities in Heilbronn are now also included.

Interested top athletes can now register for an initial meeting with Jan Willner, the representative for top-class sport at the Heilbronn universities. All information about the top-class sport scholarship is also available online.