Olympian and entrepreneur Klaus Greinert and his family established the funding program, which is unique in Germany in this form, at the University of Mannheim in 2009. In a symbolic signing on September 12, 2024 at the Bildungscampus Heilbronn, the Heilbronn universities –TUM Campus Heilbronn, DHBW Heilbronn, DHBW CAS, and Heilbronn University of Applied Sciences – Dieter Schwarz Foundation and Rhine-Neckar Metropolitan Region Scholarship for Top-Class Athletes (SSMRN) sealed their partnership in promoting dual careers combining studies and top-class sports.
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.
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”. Daniel Gottschald, Managing Director of “Die TUM Campus Heilbronn gGmbH”, explains 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.
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.