from the eyes of a roach episode 4

The Psychological Perspective: Sports

By: Sam Pernicano

This time I am going to talk about a subject all guys hold near and dear to their chests and biceps, sports.  I bet you didn’t think that I would bring psychology into sports, but sports involve a lot of psychology.  I bet you heard your coaches say that line, “sports are 40% mental and 60% physical, or something like that.   Please don’t come kick my butt over the statistics. 

That “mental” aspect of sports is actually what drove it to the popularity where it is today.  Being Italian I'm a soccer person myself, but I’m going to try and discuss the basic psychological aspects of different sports.  Baseball, football, soccer, and hockey, they all involve different psychological aspects to them, as well as some similar ones.

Traits of sports go all the way back to the middle ages, when kids would take an actual pig bladder, fill it up with air, and toss it around.  This is why a football is nicknamed a “pigskin” also because some authentic footballs used to be made out of pigs flesh.  I’m not sure if they still do this, but some places probably do.  Track racing goes way back, people weren’t track runners, but they were racing each other to see who could run the fastest. 

As time progressed, random physical activity began to go from just fun and entertainment to cultural fad.  As different cultures began developing different activities, other cultures became interested in these activities as well.  Somebody would travel to a country and see the “sport” and go back to their home and tell their country about it.  Then their country began to “practice” this “sport”.  This eventually spread and spread till it covered a multitude of countries.  Eventually the country that created the “sport” finds out that other people are playing it as well, and they become angry that it was taken from them and jealous that other people are playing it as well. 

Why am I telling you this? Because it is this anger and jealousy that has formed all the sports leagues and different sports that we have today.  What happens when one culture takes an idea from another culture? That idea is adapted to the new culture and becomes a part of the natural culture.  What does any of this have to do with psychology? Well there are a lot of different techniques used in sports.

In baseball you have to use hand eye coordination to catch, throw, and hit the ball, there are hand signals that the pitcher exchanges between himself and the catcher, each player on base has specific hand or eye signals that they make to the pitcher to let him know silently to be ready to throw the ball to the base. 

In football you have intimidation, “player lingo”, competition for dominance, a “leader”, or the quarterback, and pride. 

In soccer you have foot eye coordination where you need to be able to judge where to kick the ball and how to do it, you have voice commands that signal when you are open or when a person is about to be taken, you have hand and eye signals that only your teammates understand, if you are the goalie you have to be able to judge where the ball is going to go and try to catch it with very little time to think, you have to learn to dribble without kicking the ball to hard, and you have to learn how to steal a ball from another person without getting a flag thrown down on you.

In hockey you have intimidation, extreme hand eye coordination and balance, you have to be able to hit the puck without devoting your stick into the ice and missing the puck, you have you have to be very agile and fast, if you are a goalie you have to have extremely quick reflexes and good eyesight, and you have to be able to pass the puck to the open players on your team before you get knocked over or the puck gets stolen.

You may not realize it, but all these things I listed require intense psychological power of the brain.  In baseball you have to use hand eye coordination to catch throw, and hit the ball.   This takes extreme effort and practice over time.  You must train your brain to send signals to both your arms and hands, and eyes.  As you practice swinging at balls you will get more accurate. 

“Keep your eye on the ball,” as the coach always says.  Well its true.  If you watch the ball as it’s pitched and you follow it to the plate and swing, you will have a better chance if hitting it.  Here's a tip, if your team is up to bat, watch the pitcher pitch the ball.  Follow the ball from beginning to end.  As you begin to watch the path of the ball, your hand eye coordination will become instinct do to mental training.  If your up to bat and you watch the ball fly out of the pitchers hand, your brain will instantaneous estimated course of the ball and will make your body swing the bat in a specific location or length that it expects the ball to go. 

How do I explain this simply? Well go out somewhere private and take some baseballs or tennis balls.  Just start tossing them into the air, follow them as they go up into the air and as they come back down and then try to hit them.  It’s fairly easy at first.  Once you get this perfect, size down to a smaller ball and do the same thing.  Keep sizing down till you get down to pebbles that are so small that you can see them go up, but not when they come down.  Sound stupid? Try it, and when you can break a 4-inch stick into five pieces and hit every pebble you throw up into the air.  You will be able to hit just about every ball thrown at you from any direction just by looking from where it goes from the pitchers hand.  You’re getting this information from the guy who nobody could strike out when he played baseball when he was younger.  That’s right; believe it or not, I had the best accuracy out of any baseball player on any team that played.  Not the best power, but nobody could throw a ball past me.

As for the hand and eye signals, let me ask you sports players this, how do you know what kind of pitch to throw when the catcher makes a hand sign to you? Do you just throw a random pitch and hope that the batter strikes out? How do you know when a guy is going to steal a base? Do you just wait till he starts to run and then throw the ball to base?

No, you read the signals given to you by the other players.  You know when the pitcher wants you to throw a fastball, slow ball, curve ball, knuckle ball, or whatever by the sign he makes behind the batter before you throw.  You look around at your basemen to see if they give you a warning sign that a man is going to try and steal a base.  Then you secretly pretend to start throwing the ball to trick the player into running in order to try and get him out.  Whether you believe it or not, you are subconsciously exchanging psychological information with the other players that only they understand, and you are mentally tricking the runner into running off base.

In football you have intimidation, which is a psychological tactic used to gain control over others or create fear in other people.  How many of you football players you’re your strength to show not just the players on the other team, but maybe even some of your own team mates that your are tough? That’s good if you do, because if the more the opposing team fears you, the more likely you are to win.  Think of war guys, countries use intimidation in war to take over countries.  “Player lingo” is something else that every football team has. 

What exactly is, “player lingo”? “Player lingo” is the language that only football players speak.  Usually it is only used when they are in the game or are discussing a plan.  Guys would you seriously go out in public and just start saying things like, “42! 64! 48! Hike! Hike! Hike! Lets get to that party!” I’m not saying that you guys party all the time, all I’m saying is that “player lingo” is something that football players may not notice because it is just the way they are supposed to talk in a game.  If you guys were to line up for a play and start shouting, “number 46, you run backwards ten yards! Number 53, you run to the goal post! I’m going to pass the ball to number 46 and he’ll throw it to you!” that would completely ruin the play.  However, by simply using player lingo the players can communicate the same thing without giving away the plan and score the touchdown.

Competition for dominance is another psychological aspect used in football.  Tell me guys, which one of you can bench press the most? Who can run the fastest? Who can run the longest before they get tired? Who can throw the farthest? Who has scored the most touchdowns? Who has the most attractive girlfriend? These things can create competition between players that drives down from our primal instinct that drives us guys to be stronger and better than any other guys.  These things, excluding the girlfriend thing, are also what affect whom the coaches “favorite” is.  While some coaches may not show it, they always have a favorite player.  Its very easy to spot the favorite, usually the coach pays the most attention to a very specific player, or puts one player in more than the others.  Some people think the quarterback is the favorite, while I DEFINITELY agrees that he is the teams favorite player and mine, he is not always the coaches favorite.

Speaking of the quarterback, he is known as the leader of the pack, the big kahuna, the godfather, the president, the czar, the king, wherever your from whatever country you come from, when you hear about the quarterback, you know your hearing about someone important.  The quarterback is a very important position on the team, probably the most important.  The quarterback calls all the plays, tells all the other players what to do and sometimes deals with problems that arise with other players.  Most quarterbacks have already had experience playing all the other positions, so if the quarterback gives you an order during a game, you’d do best to follow it.  After all the quarterback doesn’t get his position by just shaking peoples hands.  He is the psychological “brain” of the team.  If your quarterback ever gets into a spot of trouble during a game, try your best to get him back on his feet.

Pride is one of the biggest psychological motivators in football, or just about any sport.  I am associating it with football because in college football, the schools pride is on the line at every game.  School and team pride is what drives the players to win most of the time, that and the coaches constant yelling and punishments for losing.

For all you football players out there, I can sympathize with you; I bet you get a bit of a yelling to if you lose a game.  I went through high school with the worst football team I had ever seen.  However, I understand how hard the coach must push you guys.  Your schools pride is on the line at every game.  Now pride can drive a team to victory.  The more pride you have in your school, heritage, or culture, the harder you are going to try at something.  The more pride you have in your school, the harder you will play and the harder you will run, tackle, and throw.  Did you guys notice the crowd on the very first day of the year?

Almost every freshman was there.  So what about the freshmen? Well it was their first western football game and they stood up and cheered THE WHOLE GAME.  Now that is school spirit, I can’t remember whether or not you guys won the game or not though. Think about this, since then what has happened to the freshmen population at the games? What has happened to our school spirit? When one off you guys scores a touchdown, do you hear how loud we cheer? We are proud to be members of WKU and we love our football team.  My question is, how about your pride? Where is it? I believe its there.

Now lets talk about soccer, in soccer you have foot eye coordination where you need to be able to judge where to kick the ball and how to do it.  This is harder than the hand eye coordination required in baseball, due to the fact that you have to be able to judge distances and know the strength of your kick.  How do you find out the strength of your kick? You experiment and practice.  It takes time to find out just how much strength you can put out of your legs.  How can you put out more? Wear leg weights and walk with them.  Start with 5 lbs, when you get used to that, move to 10 lbs. then if you really are crazy like me and you want to be as fast and agile as possible, move on to 15 lbs (one 10 lb weight and one 5 lb), and finally 20 lbs (yes they make 20 lb leg weights).  I am not responsible if you do anything to hurt yourself by doing this.  It worked for me and made me much faster than in was in the beginning.

You have voice commands that signal when you are open or when a person is about to be taken.  These are essential if you are to play a successful game.  If you have ever played soccer, each time you or somebody else on your team is open for a pass or kick, you signal to the person with the ball.  Also if the person with the ball is headed for the goal and someone is about to overtake them and they don’t know, you signal them without warning the person on the other team.  (Well at least I did when I played.  I would be really pissed if that happened to me and nobody warned me.)

Then there are the hand and eye signals that only your teammates understand.  These are the things that are most commonly used when someone is throwing the ball in from outside the field.  It is at this point that there isn’t much of a rush to get the ball in.  The person throwing the ball looks for someone who is open and who is silently signaling to them (or being loud and open and completely giving it away like the idiots I played with), and they throw the ball to them.

 Now for the hardest position on the field, the goalie.  I think every soccer goalie deserves a weeks paid vacation at the end of the season for the crap they have to go through every game.  Being a goalie is probably the hardest position on the field.  You have to be able to catch balls before they go into the goal, block kicks, kick or throw the ball across the field after you catch it or block it, and pray that a ball doesn’t fly into their face and break their nose or knock them out.  I remember when I played soccer, we would score goals and the ball would actually get tangled in the goal netting.  One time a goalie actually got stuck trying to get a ball out of the netting.  I was thankful it was just a scrimmage, we actually had too stop practice to get her out.

To stop the ball from going into the goal takes extreme agility, hand eye coordination, and fancy footwork.  It takes a lot of psychological training to be a good goalie.  Those of you out there know what I’m talking about.  How many balls have you dropped in your career before you actually got the technique down? How many times did a player do a switch kick on you? What is a switch kick?

A switch kick is where a player has already gotten to the point that it is inevitable that they are going to attempt to score a goal at a short distance.  They have already cleared the other players and the only thing left in their way now is the goalie.  Basically they begin running straight towards the goal with the intention of kicking the ball.  You as the goalie stand in the center of the goal, because they could go kick the ball in either direction.  The person taps the ball forward a little bit so that they can run up and kick it.  Then they quickly begin moving off to the left and come running at the ball from a 45-degree right angle.  This is the point of no return so you quickly go to the right side of the goal as the player runs in to kick the ball, but right as the player gets in front of the ball, they drop their right leg underneath them and drop to the ground, spinning their left foot into the ball, catapulting it into the left side of the goal.  You don’t expect the spin, so you are helpless as the player scores a point for their team.

Has anything like that ever happened to any of you goalies out there? How about you players just running up to someone with a ball on the field.  Its one of the oldest tricks in the book in soccer and I was famous on my team for stealing balls from other the other teams players and making ridiculously cool kicks around the field. 

Next we come to dribbling and stealing a ball.  Dribbling a ball for a soccer player is second nature, but think back, it wasn’t always that way was it? It takes practice to learn to dribble without kicking the ball too far.  It takes even more practice to learn how to dribble without getting the ball stolen from you in the process (boy did I love doing that to the other teams players).  How much time did your coach spend on dribbling? I remember working on it EVERY practice. 

I was a single foot dribbler.  I couldn’t dribble with my left foot so I got used to only using my right.  I was the only player who did this.  It helped to have a free foot that I could use to help catch myself if I tripped for some reason or if I needed to trip someone else.

Stealing a ball in soccer is like a form of art.  It’s like an Italian form of art that doesn’t involve people auctioning off pieces of paper with ink on them to rich people who have the IQ of your average broomstick.  No, the art of stealing a ball in soccer is simple, but can be embarrassing if you do it wrong. 

DO NOT stand in front of a person with the intent of stealing the ball WITH YOUR LEGS OPEN.  I know that I saw multiple people doing this over the course of my life and I guess their strategy might work somewhere, but THIS IS EARTH, and here on earth that strategy never works unless you have a tail that can grab the ball when it is KICKKED RIGHT THROUGH YOUR LEGS.

Anyways, there are several ways to steal a ball.  You can try the direct approach, which works great if your bigger than the person, but if they plan to kick high, you’re going to get a face full of grass and ball.  If you are smaller and faster than the person, you can try the speed approach.  Wait till there’s a big enough distance between them and the ball for you to take it from them.  Just hope that they don’t plan on doing a running kick, cause if they do, you may be dealing with a studded cleat up your rear end.  There’s also the spin approach, where you just run in when the referee isn’t looking and drop to the ground spinning into the ball.  This has a varying effect on where the ball will go, but remember something, the bigger a person is, the harder they fall.  So if you take out a ball from underneath someone, it’s a pretty good guarantee that they’re going down with you.  If you’re bigger than the person who has the ball (you have to be at least twice the persons girth), you can either wait it out till they come to you, wait till the referee isn’t looking, or have someone distract the referee, and just charge the person down as fast as you can.  If they are stupid, they will continue coming at you, if not they will haul their butt out of the way to avoid getting tackled or knocked over.

The issue with all these ball-stealing techniques is that every single one of them has a pretty good chance of you or the player with the ball getting hurt.  One of the best ways to steal a ball, the way that I used (which coaches absolutely abolish), is to move with the person who has the ball stand in place, but trace their movements and mirror where they go and watch their feet.  When they get close enough, block them.  DO NOT charge them.  If you do, the most likely thing to happen is they will move around you.  Just continue to stand in their path and keep your feet close together so that they can't kick through you.  Let them make the first move and try to get past you. 

As soon as they make a move to get past you, make a note of where their feet and legs are positioned.  Take a look at their upper torso and note which direction it is facing, because chances are that their lower body could be aimed left and the ball could be aimed left, but if their upper torso is aimed right they will most likely make a swift turn to the right as soon as you try to go to the left.  Also watch their head and eyes while you are blocking them.  Even when their head is standing still, they may be looking for players to pass to.

So how do you steal a ball under these conditions? Simple: if they charge you on your left, but their upper and lower torso are in two completely different directions, just mirror exactly what they are doing.  This way, if they suddenly try to jerk left and go around you, you will be ready for it and you can move in and steal the ball.  Stealing a ball, and even judging which direction a person is going to kick can usually be determined simply by looking at the position of the person’s body.  Try that for a coaching technique.

Now for the final sport on my list, hockey.  Just like in football, in hockey you also have intimidation.  This is a different kind of intimidation though.  In hockey, there is a limit to the amount of violence you can exert on the other players.  However, in hockey intimidation takes on a different form.  Players throw each other onto the floor, against the wall, and into each other.  The more aggressive a player you are, the more respect you get.

Extreme hand eye coordination and balance is required to move across the ice in a hockey game.  I have a question for you, how deep do you think the ice is in a hockey rink or ice skating rink? Believe it or not, its actually less than 6-8 inches, and underneath is a concrete floor.  Well to move around on the ice it takes extreme brainpower.  In order too build the coordination required to play hockey as a professional, you must train your brain to take the images that your eyes are seeing and link them in sync with your muscle coordination.

One of the hardest things in hockey is hitting the puck without divotting your stick into the ice and missing the puck.  Or worse, sending the puck on a flight to the moon like a golf ball.  Being on ice skates on the ice makes this task even harder.  It takes supreme accuracy and training to perfect this.

To be a goalie in any sport is the hardest position in any game.  A goalie in a hockey game must be quick on their feet and have very sharp eyesight.  It takes a sharp eye to catch a flying puck. 

The final aspect of hockey is passing the puck.  It is very hard to do with all the players on the field.  You could very easily have someone steal the puck from you either before or during a pass.  How do you know who to pass it to? Because your teammates signal you when they are free in a way that the other team doesn’t notice.

Something that I didn’t mention in any of the sport descriptions is how the hand-eye coordination takes place.  Well basically your eyes see and image and it is transferred into your eyes.  Next it transfers through your rods and cones.  After that it goes straight to your occupital lobe.  For those of you that don’t know what that is, the ocupital lobe is the part of your brain that processes imagery. 

At the same time your brain is sending electrical pulses from your parital lobe to the parts of your body that need to be moved in the area that you are looking at.  The parietal lobe in this case deals with your physical actions.  It is these two things combined together that make playing sports possible.  Not just that, its why you must pratice over and over again in order to sync these two things together.

Now that i have explained all these individual aspects of the different sports, I want you to understand something, psychology is everywhere, and it is used everywhere and in everything.  From things as simple as an infants brain, to things as complicated as evolution, psychology can be used to explain most things in this world.  You just have to have the right understanding.