Volume 17 of the Willibald Gebhardt Book Series documents papers presented at the WGI conference on "Physical Education and School Sport in Europe", held in October 2022. Four sections with ten chapters are published. Roland Naul and Heinz Aschebrock report in section one on the development of the WGI on behalf of its 30 years anniversary. In Section two Tamás Csányi highlights the development of the implementation of the daily physical education lesson in Hungarian schools. Patrizia Tortella reviewed the multiple efforts of early childhood education in Italy. The third section includes five national surveys on the development of physical activity, physical education and school sports during the two waves of the Corona pandemic. Stefanie Dahl and Nils Neuber report on the case of Germany, one of the countries in Europe with the longest closure of schools and shut down of all physical activities, whereas Suzanne Lundvall and Andreas Fröberg analyzed the state of the art of school-based physical education in Swedish schools, where Covid-19 did not lead to closures of schools for primary and secondary schools up the age of 15. Furthermore, the section includes reports from the countries of the south, Slovenia, Italy, and Greece by Gregor Jurak, Erica Gobbi and Manolis Adamakis and his team. Finally, in section four, the CEREPS Consensus Statement on recovery of the COVID-19 pandemic is documented in two parts.

Stefanie Dahl received her diploma (MA) in Sport Science at the University of Freiburg in 2012. She earned her PhD degree in Sport Science from the Institute of Exercise and Sport Sciences at Münster in 2023. She is member of the Willibald Gebhardt Research Institute (WGI) and in recent years worked in different Erasmus+ projects (e.g. EUPEO). Currently, she serves as CEO of the inter-university Research Network for Children's and Youth Sports in North Rhine-Westphalia. Roland Naul worked as professor of Sport Pedagogy and Sport Science at the University of Essen, later Duisburg-Essen, for 33 years (1980-2013) and for another seven years as senior professor of European Studies in Physical Education and Youth Sport at the University of Münster (2013-2020). In 2017 he received an honorary doctoral degree from the Philosophical Faculty of Charles-University of Prague. He has published more than 30 books and 500 articles on physical education, school sports and Olympic education in different languages.