Congratulations to dr. Rasa Mikalonytė  after  successfully defendended her doctoral dissertation The Integral Impact of the Methodology of Playing in a Reduced Square Area on the Training of Young Handball Players: Orientation of Physical and Technical Abilities to Sports Mastery (Vytautas Magnus University, Education, (S 007), supervisor – prof. dr. Rūtenis Paulauskas) and aquired  doctoral degree in  Social Science (Education).

A brief annotation of it  is presented below.

Reduced Area Games (RAG) – a complex educational methodology used to develop player interaction, physical education and the teaching of the actions of the sport. For athletes in game sports, standardised methods of exercise application (repetition, interval, alternation, etc.) do not always help to maintain and improve technical and tactical fitness. The difference between RAG and other educational methods is that the educational effect is aimed at manipulating several variables at the same time: court size, number of players, duration of the game and/or the rules. This  thesis uses a mixed-method research approach, using both quantitative and qualitative research methods. A quasi-experimental research design was chosen to demonstrate the causal effects of the educational effect by manipulating the RAG as an independent variable to induce changes in the dependent variable, i.e. the players’ physical fitness and in-game physical abilities. The research  investigated the amount and intensity of player actions by collecting data on the performance of young handball players during an experimental RAG. Semi-structured interviews were chosen to conduct the qualitative research. A qualitative study was also carried out in order to further reveal and complement the results of the quantitative part of the study on the training of handball players in the reduced court area games. It aimed to clarify the training experiences of young female handball players in the context of the RAG programme. Summarising the results obtained in this thesis, we agree that the mixed research design allowed us to purposefully measure the physical fitness of young female handball players, their performance in matches and to reveal the interaction between the players through their experiences of training with games in a reduced court area.