摘要：New trends in the development of strategies for optimising the factors of sports training, which are totally interdependent with the specific competitive effort, require more and more characteristics of handball players, who must be faster, more dynamic, inventive, but especially, with a high degree of adaptability to ever-changing situations both in attack and defence. The purpose of the study is to investigate the opinion of handball specialists on the stage of preparation of handball players for the defensive game, in general and especially at the level of junior teams II, and to identify the main ways to optimise the game during the defence phases. Methods. The main research methods used were the study of specialized and interdisciplinary literature, pedagogical observation, questionnaire survey method, statistics-mathematics and graphics. So, we elaborated and applied a questionnaire to a number of 56 handball game specialists (n: 56), in connection with the need to approach the defence, different defence systems, in connection with the means used and the importance given to training factors and evaluation methods with high degree of applicability at the level of the defence game. Results and discussions. The opinion of the specialists regarding the optimisation of the handball players' preparation for the defence game represents a key point in creating a topical vision on the defence systems used, on the attention paid to the technique and tactics specific to the defence game for juniors II. Conclusions: The answers provided by the surveyed coaches are in full accordance with the opinions of specialists in the field recorded in the speciality literature, as well as with the requirements imposed by the practice of the game. Thus, it is confirmed that the motor structure of the current handball game requires defenders with a good specific technique, able to play from any position (at least for a short period of time), to have a good perception of the game; to be easily adapted to the protection systems imposed by the concrete situation in the field.
