This review aims to examine the most significant research regarding the development of talent in sport, with a focus on the quantity and type of practice necessary for the attainment of expertise. A total of 54 peer-reviewed empirical articles were collected and analysed for their content. The literature reveals considerable evidence demonstrating that both early specialization and early diversification can lead to expertise development. However, the contrasting views of deliberate practice and deliberate play do not provide a sufficient spectrum of different learning activities for talent development. Furthermore, the content analysis highlights some inconsistencies in the criteria used to characterize different types of learning activities, pointing to the need for a more rigorous and detailed characterization of activities that affect talent development throughout the lifespan. Finally, this review underscores the need for different methodological approaches to complement athletes’ perceptions of their past practice experiences gathered from retrospective interviews. The potential value of using systematic observations to provide a detailed examination of the microstructure of different learning activities is discussed.

The purpose of this study was to understand the perceptions of highly skilled and less skilled volleyball players about the influences that parents, coaches, and peers had on their sport development and performance achievement. Highly skilled (n= 30) and less skilled (n= 30) volleyball players participated in semi-structured retrospective interviews to explain how parents, coaches and peers may have influenced their sport participation. Data was analyzed through a process of content analysis. Results indicated that parents, coaches, and peers had an important influence in player's sport development but differing according to players' expertise level. Concerning to parental influences, tangible support during the early years of development was mentioned by all players. However, parents' level of involvement and parenting styles revealed interesting differences between highly skilled and less skilled players. Highly skilled players perceived a moderate parental involvement and an autonomy-supportive parenting style, while less skilled players referred a excessive parental involvement in players' sport participation. Coaches influences showed to have some similarities in the early years with all players mentioning coaches as caring and recognizing their value as an athlete. However, highly skilled players described a different training environment characterized by a demanding coach, individualized instruction, and specific goal setting. Regarding peers' influence, all players recognized that friends were not only one of the main reasons to start playing volleyball, but also an important source of support to remain engaged and staying motivated to do sport. Highly skilled players, however, mentioned the importance of teammates' positive push and critiques during practice for enhancing their motivation, team cohesion and friendship. They also highlighted the importance of friends outside of sport in the later years of their career by acting as an escape from all the pressure that emerged from volleyball training and competition demands. Overall, these findings highlight different social influences according to the players' expertise level suggesting the need to examine more extensively the nature of significant others' support on athlete and talent development.

Contextual influences on talent development (e.g., birthplace effects) have become a topic of interest for sport scientists. Birthplace effects occur when being born in a certain city size leads to participation or performance advantages, typically for those born in smaller or mid-sized cities. The purpose of this study was to investigate birthplace effects in Portuguese volleyball players by analysing city size, as well as population density – an important but infrequently used variable. Participants included 4062 volleyball players (M_age = 33), 53.2% of whom were men. Using Portuguese national census data from 1981, we compared participants (within each sex) across five population categories. In addition, we used ANOVAs to study expertise and population density. Results indicated that men and women athletes born in districts of 200,000–399,999 were 2.4 times more likely to attain elite volleyball status, while all other districts decreased the odds of expert development. For men, being born in high-density areas resulted in less chance of achieving expertise, whereas there were no differences for women. The results suggest that athletes’ infrastructure and social structure play an important role in talent development, and that these structures are influenced by total population and population density, respectively.

Purpose: Using an action-research design, this study examined the impact of combining concepts from two contemporary pedagogical approaches, the Constraints-led Approach (CLA) and Step-Game Approach (SGA), on the development of youth volleyballers’ tactical knowledge, as expressed in performance, throughout a full competitive season. Method: Fifteen players and one coach participated in this study, which involved three action-research cycles, each including the processes of planning, acting and monitoring, reflecting, and fact-finding. The first author, who had the role of coach-researcher, collected data using a reflexive diary and field notes between September 2017 and June 2018, as well as eight semi-structured focus-group interviews. Data were analyzed using thematic analysis, in which inductive procedures deepened understanding of the development of the participants’ tactical knowledge. Results: Findings suggested that combining CLA with SGA improved tactical knowledge in specific ways. Players progressed from a starting point where they were only able to describe game scenarios, and act without tactical criteria or considering contextual game constraints, to a point where their intentions during tactical actions were shaped by their ability to think strategically and guide their attention to recognize and interpret different constraints. Conclusions: Results suggested that the development of players’ tactical knowledge benefited from a mutual integration of different, yet complementary, pedagogical approaches. By integrating SGA and CLA it was possible to enhance players’ adaptable thinking using learning tasks involving the manipulation of meaningful constraints that afforded variable repetition and the resolution of tactical problems.

This study aimed to examine the sport participation of 229 Portuguese volleyball players through a previously validated questionnaire within different stages of their development and considering their expertise level and gender. The skilled players differed from the less skilled in having accrued more hours of training throughout all stages. Female players reported less early sport involvement (fewer number of sports practiced and less involvement in team sports and competitions) than males. The early involvement in individual sports by skilled female players seems to be important in their route to expertise, while the later involvement in individual sports by less-skilled male players possibly indicates the need for other motivational sport experiences. These particular findings provide valuable information to guide the designs of Portuguese volleyball players' development considering gender and expertise at the same time. However, additional work is needed to understand to what extent these findings may be system, culture or sport dependent.