After his coverage of the 2007 World Cup, Andrea Zorzi is back this year with more videos interviews and coverage of the 2008 FIVB events (the World Grand Prix 9-13 July in Yokohama (JPN), the World League 23-27 July Rio de Janeiro (BRA) and the Olympic Games 8-24 August in Beijing (CHN)) on his blog.

A matter of Chunks:

In this post, Andrea analyses the 2008 World Grand Prix through the concept of Chunks.

If you are not familiar with this concept, here's a definition Andrea gives:

[the term chunk indicates memory structures that can be used as units of perception and meaning, and chunking is the learning mechanisms leading to the acquisition of these chunks.

*This is the Wikipedia quotation explaining the meaning of chunk in cognitive psychology and mnemonics.

Then Zorzi applies this concept to Volleyball with a fantastic example :

[Try to put yourself in the shoes of a Volleyball middle blocker, while his team-mate is serving.
He’s looking at the opponent side but from the sound of the hand hitting the ball, he can identify the kind of serve. Then, just looking at the position of the opponent passer, he can cut out many possibilities, making his decision easier. The stronger players don’t need to see where the pass will arrive because they anticipate the passing trajectory just by processing the data they quickly recognize.
After that, the middle blocker will focus on the opponent setter’s choice. Dealing with the information available from the previous statistical studies and the present situation, he can clearly identify the remaining possibilities. For instance, if the pass is far from the net, the threats coming from the quick attack suddenly disappear.
Then the middle blocker will focus on the opponent spiker evaluating the setting speed, the ball distance from the net, the spiker approaching, the position of his blocking mate, his own position and so on …
The athletes ceaselessly keep on with this process throughout the match, striving to be in the best position to reduce the effect of their adversaries’ plays.
Obviously, the more possibilities for opponents, the more difficult it is reacting correctly when dealing with these extra options. Volleyball is a continuous challenge in predicting what the opponent is trying to keep unpredictable.]

Make sure to read the entire post here.

Through this lens (concept of Chunks) he then goes on and analyses the 2008 World Grand Prix in this post: The seventh Brazilian victory. It is the first time I hear about this concept, but my guts feeling tells me Andrea is spot on. "Volleyball is a continuous challenge in predicting what the opponent is trying to keep unpredictable".

Volleyball is a sport with an emphasis on information, as opposed to sports with an emphasis on energy (e.g. marathon), therefore the ability to sort through a deluge of information and make sense of it all to take the right decision under the pressure of time is essential. This is often overlooked by coaches who tend to focus on teaching their players technical skills and physical training, keeping the tactical decision making process to themselves. I think that this is a mistake. The ultimate goal of any coach should be to become useless for their team. A coach is a guide, someone who shows you the way. The players have to walk the walk.

Teach your team how to become autonomous and responsible instead of obedient. Quite similar to parenting in a way, but I digress...

Here's Andrea's explanation of his personal ranking:

[ Fisrt of all, I have to make clearer that the only aim of my personal “Chunk Ranking” is to identify the team endowed with the bigger “Chunk”. 
Having a bigger Chunk means to deal with a lot of information as a single unit of perception. Obviously, the victories depend on many other factors, as technical skills, physical conditions, right emotional approach an so on.
Lastly, I tried to identify the “Team’s Chunk” and not the “Individual Chunk”, given that the Volleyball performances depend mainly on the level of sharing of individual abilities.]

and his analysis of the Brazilian team chunking:

[BRAZIL is by far the best team. They react correctly almost ever, as dealing with complex options as with plain situations. The Brazilian players seemingly process effortless a huge amount of data. All the players are able to follow highly developed strategies in all the fundamentals and their lowest performance level is pretty high. Therefore, Ze Roberto’s players rarely suffer a long losing streak.]

Here's the official final standing (right picture) and Zorzi's personal Chunk Ranking (picture on the left):

The only difference between the two rankings concerns the Cuban's team, rated last by Zorzi when they actually made the finals. Here's what Andrea thinks about Cuba:

[CUBA placed sixth but they won the second place here, in Yokohama! The coaching autarchy and the unbelievable physical skills inhibited the growth of Cuban chunk. Cuba is a very strong team, but their data processing aptitude is really weak. Since the nineties, when they won three Olympic Games in a row (1992, 1996, 2000) relying on astonishingly talented players, Cuban Volleyball followed the same patterns: serve and spike as powerfully as possible. These athletes aren’t so excellent to win as much as the former Cuban athletes were. At the same time, the good results they achieved, don’t force the coaches to search for new ways.]

For a complete analysis of all teams, click here.

Finally, without undermining the more traditionally well known important aspects of the game (technical skills, physical condition and right emotional approach) Zorzi emphasizes the importance of the ability for the athletes to learn from and adapt to the various situations of the game. If your team doesn't have an overwhelming physical advantage, you'd better start empowering your athletes now with the ability to learn by themselves.