Training als Verflechtungsgeschehen

The contribution is based on praxeographic observations of volleyball team’s training processes. We suggest to reflect on the training processes as practices in which more knowledge is used than the practitioners themselves are aware of. It becomes clear in this perspective that the competencies to participate are developed by the participants mutually enabling each other to do so. Competencies are therefore to be understood as constitutively relational and cannot be ascribed to isolated individuals. Their training takes place in socio-material arrangements of successively complex exercises in which the structures characteristic of the game and the respective competencies are addressed and practiced in various, barely reflected techniques calling on dispositions generated before. In these arrangements, the players learn to deal with the urgency and possibilities of interaction. Through experience, they develop an embodied, preconscious sense for the game which enables them to adjust to complex gameplay as a team even under enormous time pressure. At the level of linguistic articulation and awareness, however, training is often rationalized by methodologically individualistic (action-theoretical) or holistic (structuralist) assumptions so that the implicit knowledge mobilized in the training practice remains largely unreflected and is instead reduced to explicit components in the respective reflective training procedures.