Procedural knowledge, decision-making and game performance analysis in Female Volleyball’s attack according to the player’s experience and competitive success

The purpose of this study was to analyse procedural knowledge, decision-making and game performance of the zone 4 attackers in Volleyball, according to the players’ experience and competitive performance. A verbal interview protocol was implemented immediately after randomly chosen live game actions to analyze procedural knowledge. Decision-making and players’ performance were analyzed by video images. Oneway Anova, Independent Samples t-Test, and Pearson Chi-Square were applied to data analysis. The results showed that more experienced and more successful players play more under goal concepts than condition concepts and concern more often with the opponent. Specifically, more experienced players mentioned more goal concepts and less sophisticated conditions, as more successful players mentioned more action concepts. More experienced players also presented fewer condition concepts than the less experienced ones. Successful players tended to make more appropriate decisions. However, as player’s experience and competitive success are multidimensional variables they might not be fully well characterized by the number of years of practice and competitive results. Therefore, future research is required, and it should include other criteria to characterize both variables. Moreover, qualitative analysis is needed, since it will allow a deeper understanding of the tactical development of the players according to the specific nature of the training process, and also considering the competitive success and the player’s experience as multidimensional variables.