Funded by the Federal Institute for Sports Science (BISp)

Duration:
1 January 2014 to
31 December 2015

Key question

In the research project, the team building of a volleyball team in the highest performance class (the U20 women's national team of the German Volleyball Association, which participates in the 1st Bundesliga as VCO-Berlin with a special authorisation) is being investigated empirically and practically: How does the team systematically develop its playing ability in various training sessions, team meetings and matches so that it is able to organise itself appropriately under competitive conditions?

Practical analysis optics

From a praxeological point of view, teams are faced with the constitutive problem that sports games unfold in complex figurations (Norbert Elias) of reciprocally inducing and limiting, antagonistic and co-operative actions. The games develop a momentum of their own that cannot be fully controlled either from the outside or from the inside, in which the most diverse "participands" (Stefan Hirschauer) - bodies, spaces, objects, rules, etc. - are involved. - are involved. Game design and game control thus remain a permanent organisational problem that a team must continuously solve itself in the game: it must acquire the ability to (re-)act appropriately to the situation, even under conditions of extreme urgency, and to create practical opportunities to continue playing. Despite all the team's pre-planning and tactical-strategic orientations, the (creative) handling of uncertainty and unpredictability is a decisive success factor. From this perspective, team building is not an additional measure, but a central challenge of the entire coaching programme.

On the basis of the praxeological approach, the performance of a team depends neither (exclusively) on the decisions and coordination performance of intentional player-subjects nor on tactical-strategic guidelines. Rather, it is about the problem of how the team can succeed in making its players 'available' as competent team-mates. The organisational practices and socio-material arrangements (Theodore W. Schatzki), in which the dispositions (Gilbert Ryle) necessary for successful cooperation and teamwork are mobilised and (should) be 'supplied' for targeted processing in training, thus move to the centre of the analysis.

Collective game knowledge

With this approach to the problem of developing collective playing ability, we do not radically question established training methods and psychological interventions, but rather scrutinise and reflect on commonly used methods with regard to their assumptions, limitations and modes of action. Praxeological observation focuses attention not only on the explicit (e.g. technical and tactical) knowledge used in the game, but also and above all on an embodied knowledge that is or must be implicitly mobilised as "tacit knowledge" (Michael Polanyi). This knowledge is not exclusively localised in the heads of individual 'decision-makers', but is distributed as "practical sense" (Pierre Bourdieu) or "knowing how" (Gilbert Ryle) in practice between appropriately disposed participants. Such a decentralised and collective knowledge and ability is indispensable, especially for the players, in order to be able to participate competently in the game, coordinate continuously under the highest time pressure, master unforeseeable situations and creatively seize "situational potentials" (François Jullien).