Canberra, Australia, August 21, 2016 – Volleyball Australia and the AIS have announced that Volleyball will house its four national indoor volleyball programs at the AIS for the Tokyo Olympic cycle.

The programs include the Volleyroos Men’s and Women’s National Teams and the Men’s and Women’s Centres of Excellence (pre-elite development programs).  The Centres of Excellence will be full-time programs, and the Volleyroos will hold all their national team camps at the AIS Canberra campus, enabling Australia’s best volleyball players, and the next generation of the Volleyroos, to train side-by-side during those camps.

President of Volleyball Australia, Craig Carracher said: “The AIS is our national competitive advantage.  It represents the high performance culture we require to compete in a global team sport and to assist us to overcome barriers of distance and the required intensity of competitive opportunity.  The AIS consolidates core expertise and a daily training environment essential to giving confidence to our athletes, coaches and staff in our systems and processes to deliver performance improvements. 

“The Women’s Centre of Excellence is a new program reflecting our commitment to support our female indoor players and their coaches to an international standard after 12 years without a centralised full-time program. Our women’s beach volleyball teams have led the way in Rio with all the Olympians having developed skills from their experience with indoor volleyball, an essential technical training environment for our athletes and our coaches.  We are very appreciative of the support in terms of facilities and services that the AIS is prepared to offer, and the benefits of contributing to the high performance culture at the AIS,” said Carracher.

Matt Favier, Director of the AIS, welcomed this extended partnership with Volleyball Australia. “We are delighted that Volleyball has agreed to locate its Women’s Centre of Excellence program at the AIS Canberra campus for the coming Olympiad.  The AIS campus is the ideal location for full-time elite development programs such as this and it is ideally equipped to support training for senior national teams.

Volleyball Australia will also collaborate with the AIS in further developing its Volleyball Australia – Performance Analysis Research Centre (V-PARC) to provide cutting-edge statistics and video analysis for both indoor and beach volleyball and to provide education and research capability for our performance analysis coaches. 

The Beach Volleyroos National Training Centre and the Beach Volleyball Centre of Excellence in Adelaide, supported by the South Australian Sports Institute, will continue to be complemented by the Australian Beach Volleyball Network of centres around the country.  Additional beach volleyball facilities and training for the indoor players will also be available in Canberra, to enable better talent transfer from one discipline to the other.