Abstract

The purpose of the present study was to characterize the oral intervention of the coaches, in the preparation meetings for the volleyball competition. The aims were: to analyse the content interventions given by the coaches, in general, and to their own team and the opposing one; to verify if there is any difference between the information, given by the coaches, to the male and female teams, in general, and to their own team and the opposing one. The sample was 17 volleyball coaches, 9 from masculine sector and 8 from the feminine one, who disputed the national cham­pionship senior, division A1, in the sportive season 2002/2003. We used the Systematic Analysis of Pedagogical Content Interven­tions (SAPCI) of Gilbert et al. (1999), adapted to the volleyball specificity. This study showed the following conclusions: The information given is mainly on tactic category, principally the tactic of collective defence information, about own team, and the tactic of individual attack information, when they refer to the opposing team; we found significant differences in the category others components of sportive performance; on the interventions about the own team we found significant differences in the category others components of sportive performance and in the tactic category.