Team Profile

VEN/Venezuela   

After a year’s sabbatical Venezuela returns to the World League hoping to improve their overall record.

Three attempts from 2001 to 2003 only recorded three 13th place finishes so for Venezuela any improvement would be significant.

Since 2003 Venezuela has undergone some changes with Eliseo Ramos replacing Jose David Suarez as coach yet the nucleus of the youthful Venezuelan side still remains and, much to the pleasure of all Venezuelan fans, so does their point scoring machine Ernardo ‘Harry’ Gomez.

While Venezuela’s performances to date have been a little below par, the same can not be said about Gomez who has proven to be the life and soul of this team in recent years.

Unfortunately though for Gomez, much of his hard work has been in vein as Venezuela has been in the shadow of the two dominant Volleyball superpowers of the South American continent, Brazil and Argentina.

But this country's national team has shown it has quality on the international scene when in 1960, at its first ever World Championship, it claimed a solid 10th place.

A new era for Volleyball in Venezuela began in 1992 when the country embarked on an ambitious plan to develop the sport, focusing on competitions in the youth categories. With Cuban coach Jose David Suarez Perez at the helm, himself a former member of Cuba's national squad, their development plan has begun to pay off.

Venezuelan Volleyball has been on the ascendance ever since despite some recent hiccups. The country's junior team was among the best in the world, winning the valuable bronze medal at the 2001 World Championship in Poland. However both their junior and youth sides recorded 13th place finishes at their respective World Championships in 2003.

In 2001 Perez led Venezuela to the FIVB elite World League for the first time, a clear signal of the new status of the country's Volleyball but in the 2002 edition of the World League Venezuela managed only one victory over Cuba before recording a total of only four victories in 2003, a clear indication that work still has to be done to reach the pinnacle and successfully challenge the superpowers.

There is however little doubt that this youthful squad, with Gomez as its main attacking force, certainly has a future. It is a product of a well-structured program with a concentration on ever-growing youth talent.

More and more of Venezuela's young talent are playing overseas, exposing them to the rigors of international Volleyball and now as the 2003 PanAmerican champion, having finished ahead of world champions Brazil, Cuba and USA and an encourgaing eighth place finish at the 2003 World Cup, things look as though they are going from strength to strength.

One waits with great anticipation to see how they fare in the 2005 World League Pool A with Brazil, Japan and Portugal.