The members of the FIVB Technical and Coaching Commission gathered in Lausanne

Lausanne, Switzerland, February 15, 2017 – It was definitely a meeting of the minds on Tuesday, as volleyball’s leading coaches came together for the Technical and Coaching Commission, to discuss key issues affecting the sport.



“Volleyball is not broken, but can benefit from improvements,” said Karch Kiraly, three-time Olympic gold medallist and current coach of the US women’s national team. He was joined at the table by the President of the Commission, New Zealand’s Hugh McCutcheon (former coach of the US men’s national team that won gold in Beijing in 2008), Brazil’s Jose ‘Ze Roberto’ Guimaraes (who has taken his country’s men’s and women’s national teams to three Olympic gold medals), Italy’s Giovanni Guidetti (former coach of the Dutch women’s volleyball team that won silver in the 2015 European Championship), Great Britain’s Olympic women's coach Audrey Cooper and the coach of the Egyptian men’s volleyball team, Sherif El Shemerly. Also present was Toshiro Endo, team manager with the Japan Volleyball Association's women's national teams.



The Commission decided on the creation of working groups to investigate the following issues:



The improvement of coaching development and education



• The Commission agreed that the FIVB should continue to play an active role in the creation of content for online education courses for coaches at all levels of development while a key proposal was to hand over the running of local training programmes for coaches to the national federations. The need to increase gender equality in the profession was also recognised and a proposal was put forward to create an FIVB led mentoring programme that would have coaches work with their counterparts in a different country to improve knowledge sharing.



Rule changes or rule modifications to facilitate fan understanding and to improve general flow and delivery of the game



• The Commission Members suggested 1) the introduction of quick substitution rules to speed up the game 2) to increase the number of substitutions per set allowing for free substitution of players ; 3) a review of the net touch rule in order to avoid interruptions that are unclear to fans; and 4) to continue improving the challenge system operation and to study all issues affecting time duration to avoid over extended matches.



Events calendar planning



• Recognising the need to provide players with enough time for recuperation between seasons, members proposed further work with other Commissions to carry out a review of the current volleyball calendar.



The ways in which coaches help to tell the story of the sport in a consistent manner



• Members of the Commission agreed to actively participate in actions to improve public engagement with the sport by: 1) enhancing the language of volleyball by creating more expressions to define different situations that happen during the matches and 2) making the rules of the game clearer and consistent between volleyball and beach volleyball.



• Following a new format, FIVB Commissions now have no more than 10 members in total – a President, Secretary and eight members – to facilitate communication. The Commissions will lean on experts in the field for ideas and solutions although only members will be allowed to vote on proposals put forward to the Board of Administration. The Technical and Coaching Commission also includes Chinese legend Lang Ping, France's Philippe Blain (Commission Secretary) and Kiwon Park, who has coached the national teams of Iran and Korea.

