The Player CARE Charter: a draft and an invitation
For the past five years, with support from Movember, we've trained people across UK, Irish and Australian esports in psychological first aid. Committee members, team captains, coaches and staff at clubs including Fnatic, Excel, Endpoint, Method and Manchester City Esports have all been through it.
Each year, however, we start again. Committee members graduate, staff leave, and much of what they knew about running the organisation goes with them. The organised ones make sure their successors know who the welfare lead is, where the escalation route goes, and what to do at midnight when someone messages the server in distress. We want to champion those people, and recognise how far the organisations we work with go for their players.
Player CARE Charter
The Player CARE Charter is an annual award for esports societies, degree programmes and professional teams. It asks six things: whether someone is responsible for welfare, whether people can recognise when a member is struggling, whether that member knows where to go, whether your online spaces are actually moderated, whether any of it survives handover, and whether you ever check that it works.
There are three levels. Bronze is achievable in a term by a society with no budget. Nobody fails. If you meet a lower level than the one you applied for, you get that award immediately, with feedback on what was missing and another go at the level above.
We want your input
The criteria are published today as a draft, open for comment until 15 November.
The most useful things you can tell us:
Is Bronze achievable for your organisation this term? If not, what's in the way?
Is anything in there missing from, or irrelevant to, esports?
Does the Continuity section reflect what handover is actually like?
Who in your institution would need to be involved for you to reach Silver?
Every organisation that responds will be named as a contributor to the first edition, unless you'd rather not be.
Dates
15 November — consultation closes
1 December — final criteria published, applications open
31 January — applications close
1 May — first awards announced
The timing is deliberate. Most organisations and societies review their arrangements after the summer, and the awards land on 1 May, so the committee that did the work receives it before handover rather than after they've gone.
Two things worth saying plainly
The Player CARE Coach training many of you have taken and rely on to train new players, staff, and committee members remains free thanks to the investment Movember made in the programme between 2021 and 2026. That isn't changing. We do want to sustain and develop the programme, and the wider work we do with the community. The Charter is how we hope to fund that.
And you don't need our training to hold the Charter. Mental Health First Aid and other routes count. We didn't want to write a standard that only we could help you meet.
