The ability to anticipate and make accurate decisions in a timely manner is fundamental to high-level performance in sport. This is the first book to identify the underlying science behind anticipation and decision making in sport, enhancing our scientific understanding of these phenomena and helping practitioners to develop interventions to facilitate the more rapid acquisition of the perceptual-cognitive skills that underpin these judgements. Adopting a multidisciplinary approach — encompassing research from psychology, biomechanics, neuroscience, physiology, computing science, and performance analysis — the book is divided into three sections. The first section provides a comprehensive analysis of the processes and mechanisms underpinning anticipation and skilled perception in sport. In the second section, the focus shifts towards exploring the science of decision making in sport. The final section is more applied, outlining how the key skills that impact on anticipation and decision making may be facilitated through various training interventions. With chapters written by leading experts from a vast range of countries and continents, no other book offers such a synthesis of the historical development of the field, contemporary research, and future areas for investigation in anticipation and decision making in sport. This is a fascinating and important text for students and researchers in sport psychology, skill acquisition, expert performance, motor learning, motor behaviour, and coaching science, as well as practicing coaches from any sport.

This book provides a detailed review of much of the existing research on visual perception and sports performance. It summarises and integrates the findings of up to five hundred articles from areas as diverse as cognitive and ecological psychology.

Discover the next frontier in sports training—improving your mental game, no matter your age or experience—and how to become the Playmaker, both in your professional and personal life. Coaches search for it. Parents dream of it. Fans love it. Athletes want it. The playmaker on any sports team possesses it: an elusive, intangible quality combining anticipation, perception, and decision-making skills. This quality raises their game above the competition and allows them to pass when no one else can, anticipate the movement of opponents, avoid costly mental mistakes, and ultimately, hold the team together. Now, for the first time, cognitive science research is revealing the secrets of the playmaker’s keen sense of awareness. Just as tests of speed, strength, and agility have provided a baseline of physiological biomarkers, coaches can now capture cognitive metrics including attention, pattern recognition, anticipation, and the ability to take quick, decisive action during the chaos of competition. The Playmaker’s Advantage is a groundbreaking book that will educate athletes of all ages about this essential creative capability in an accessible, easy to understand method.

Joan Vickers presents evidence on gaze control within visual perception and action in sport as well as the science underlying decision training.

The ball handler who fakes and then drives past a defender for an easy score. A pass rusher who leaves a would-be blocker in his wake on the way to sacking the quarterback. A setter who manages to maneuver both body and ball in the blink of an eye to make the perfect pass for the kill and match-winning point. These are all reasons agility and quickness are such prized physical attributes in modern sport. Efforts to become markedly quicker or more agile, however, aren’t always successful. Genetic limitations, technical deficiencies, and inferior training activities are among the major obstacles. Developing Agility and Quickness helps athletes blow past those barriers thanks to the top sport conditioning authority in the world, the National Strength and Conditioning Association. NSCA hand-picked its top experts to present the best training advice, drills, and programs for optimizing athletes’ linear and lateral movements. Make Developing Agility and Quickness a key part of your conditioning program, and get a step ahead of the competition.

Sport performance analysis techniques help coaches, athletes and sport scientists develop an objective understanding of actual sport performance, as opposed to self-report, fitness tests or laboratory based experiments. For example, contemporary performance analysis enables elite sports people and coaches to obtain live feedback of match statistics and video sequences using flexible internet systems, systems that have become an indispensible tool for all those involved in high performance sport. The Routledge Handbook of Sports Performance Analysis is the most comprehensive guide to this exciting and dynamic branch of sport science ever to be published. The book explores performance analysis across the four main contexts in which it is commonly used: support for coaches and athletes; the media; judging sport contests, and academic research. It offers an up-to-date account of methodological advances in PA research, assesses the evidence underpinning contemporary theories of sport performance, and reviews developments in applied PA across a wide range of sports, from soccer to track and field athletics. Covering every important aspect of PA, including tactics, strategy, mechanical aspects of technique, physical aspects of performance such as work-rate, coach behaviour and referee behaviour, this is an essential reference for any serious student, researcher or practitioner working in sport performance analysis, sport coaching or high performance sport.

This book introduces a new view of agility theory, given recent serious discussion concerning the methods of open-loop skills improvement. It offers experimental research results and theoretical knowledge on both reactive and running types of agility. The book also details a number of agility training methods and exercises.