Figure 2. Accumulated amount of practice in hours of Brazilian experts (Practice E) and amount of play (Competition E) as compared to American experts' counterparts (Practice I) and amount of play (Competition I). From a quantitative stand-point Brazilians practiced and played significantly more than the American counterparts.
In order to achieve exceptional levels of performance, the Brazilians engaged in a huge quantity and quality of practice not documented before in the volleyball literature (Da Matta, 2004; Da Matta, 2015). The major focus of Brazil has been improving the quality of practice and investmenting in injury prevention interventions to expand the longevity of players. Brazil has also abandoned some rigid long-term practice guidelines to embrace new concepts of expertise development that would best fit the needs of individual expert players according to their own specialized positions standards and criteria. In addition, Brazil creates a constant assessment program, adopts an individualized method of training, and implements a technical compensatory practice process to intentionally improve performance. Brazilian coaches invested in a holistic approach that aimed to enhance technical, tactical, physical, cognitive, and psychological performances of all teams while highlighting the athletes' wellness for short and long-term player development. The qualitative thematic analysis and the content analyses exerted from the data and from interviews revealed that the quality of practice of Brazilian volleyball players who won the 2008 and 2012 Olympic Games, in Beijing and London respectively, was also superlative. After 2004, we have collected the same information through multiple sources/methods, and we have done further analysis on how much and what type of practice expert players from Brazil have been through. We observed that the hours of practice continue to accumulate. The main impact of this accumulation of deliberate practice is technical improvement of its players. On four different occasions, I have visited the Center for Volleyball Development and I was able to verify that practice intensity levels have maintained high over the past 12 years (Figure 2). From 2002 through 2016, I have been analyzing the career paths of top Brazilian and USA teams probing to find patterns, meaningful trends, and breakthroughs that can explain what experts do to reach and sustain exceptional levels of performance. The data analysis reveals remarkable amounts of practice and play.
Figure 3. Accumulated amount of practice beyond their 10th year and accumulated amount of play comparing Brazilian and American experts.
In figure 3, the author shares the amount of practice experienced by expert players exceeding the threshold of 10,000 hours. In fact, there is solid documentation that about 8-12 volleyball players, who have played in 3-5 Olympic Games, and have practiced almost 30,000 hours. E.g. Carol Gataz, Walewska Oliveira and Helia Souza (Fofao, Volleyball Hall of Fame). Thus, these cases raise the idea that the amount of practice is not the cause of career ending injuries, but the quality of practice might be.
In many cases (setters, liberos, and middles) the amount of practice and play would imply a positive performance effect considering that on the national team those players (setters, liberos and middles) were practicing with an expert coach and at their professional clubs they were also practicing with another world-class coach. Interestingly there has been a rotation among outside hitters, perhaps because volleyball players in those positions have been utilized heavily. Therefore, it is plausible that a higher rate of wear and tear has impacted them. The process to find experts and to collect valid and reliable data was extremely difficult. But the true challenge was to find foundational articles that would explain what was going on in the gyms, simply because there was not enough research in volleyball expertise from 2000 to 2008, though perseverance has revealed some. The level of performance depends on the level of commitment, practice infra-structure, and level of organization of clubs, colleges, and governing bodies. The more organized and the more committed, the more practice is observed and of a higher quality, and thereby the highest levels of performances are achieved.
Figure 4. Dr. Gylton Da Matta former Head Volleyball Coach of Barcelona Volleyball. The base for top performances has been implemented. The Juveniles-based women's team. Photo by Jordi Catala.
My approach consisted of identifying an expert team and their expert performers and examining their careers in order to find intentional procedures that were deliberately implemented and that led into consistent results in the past and subsequent years. So far, three teams have demonstrated a coherent philosophy of practice that has sustained results to be the most successful in the world: the Russians, the Americans and the Brazilians. The Russian School is supported by a long-term expertise development based on a multilateral system of practice in which cross-training, practice variability, and talent detection has also been boosted through the adoption of other performance enhancement strategies. In Russia, it has been very common that athletes are exposed to a multi-training athletic initiation and then after 12 years of age they are selected to play specific sports. Embracing the notion that the so-called cross-training does not transfer into volleyball specific skills acquisition, U.S.A coaching education instructors say that their philosophy consists in recruiting athletes that naturally possess the talent and the skills necessary for them to perform at elite levels. The American volleyball school is very solid.
The tradition of U.S.A. teams being top finalists in many Olympic and World Championship tournaments demonstrates that the U.S.A. is a powerhouse. Most of the 5,000 universities and colleges plus the more than 6,000 junior/youth volleyball clubs provide a huge number of players that are selected from more than 12 high performance tryouts to represent Team USA. This is a very well-designed program and with a very business-oriented, high-performance pipeline generating dozens of elite U.S. teams that have similar mindsets. Although each different college has a diverse approach in the ways technique and tactics are conceptualized, with the use of strong statistics almost 200 elite players per year apply to represent the U.S. at the international competitions. The social-economic status of the richest country in the world and the use of an arsenal of technological coaching advancements make talent selection, retention and identification a favorable process. For instance, there are more than 20 national qualifier tournaments with approximately 1,000 teams playing in the United States every year in 200 volleyball courts under the same roof. The mega infra-structure and the quantity of players generated by the U.S. high performance program has its merit. In 2010, 2012, 2014 and 2015, team USA has reported in all of their high-performance coaches' clinics that their main priority is to invest in the education of their players and educational volleyball system. Administrators, head coaches, and assistant coaches of the national teams consistently reported that they try to follow athletes' practice routines in season but essentially, their teams try out on one or two occasions, practice one or two weeks, travel to major international FIVB events, and once in a while, they win. In fact, the same phenomenon has just happened with the U.S. senior team winning the World-Championship in Italy 2014 and the U18 Girls World-Championship in Egypt 2019, for the first time ever. In all these events the performances of the U.S. Volleyball players and coaching staff were superb. The success of the American program is not an accident as all. The simplicity and humbleness of American volleyball players and coaches reflect a casual and yet awesome ethos in experiencing volleyball.
The Brazilian Volleyball School, however, is very unique and the ingenuity of Brazilian Coaches in designing practices has been characterized as a factor of expertise development in a program that does not have much technology, infra-structure, nor economic resources. Other than in the national team's high-performance program, Brazil relies on sports for social development for identifying talents for its pipeline. Brazilian public school system represents the level of a developing country, but it also has unique regulations towards coaches' eligibility and developmental rules for tournaments ages 10-16. Brazilian coaches are all Physical Educators who graduated from a 4-year college. The methodology of applied sports sciences, the didactics and sports pedagogy represent the pillars of the Brazilian Volleyball Schools. The didactics, planning and applied sports science of teachers and coaches is outstanding. "Our deliberate practice is our science", is a Brazilian motto. I have said this phrase while searching for a foundation of coaching in neuroscience and in motor control. The success of Brazilian volleyball relies on practical approaches to technical training, common sense volleyball specific conditioning, deliberate practice, and deliberate play. But certainly, the Brazilian volleyball school has been able to develop effective descriptions of technical agility and finesse in volleyball (Da Matta, 2004).
In Brazilian volleyball, quality of practice is still a priority in the minds of its hundreds of coaches distributed throughout the country in public schools,...
