Sports: A Matter of Intuition and Practice

Many of us would agree in saying that sports have some part in our lives, whether we partake in them or merely watch them on the television. On the other hand, what we all may not agree on is how athletes become so great, or fall short of it. I would consider sports and the skills of athletes to be best described as intuitive in that it all depends on perception. Perception is what separates the boys from the men, the girls from the women, the amateurs from the pros. This is clearly seen in David Esptein’s book The Sports Gene, where studies of perceptive capacity appear. The studies revealed that there was a huge difference in the perception of things like ball location and opponents’ boy movements between amateurs and professionals, and these perceptions are key to success in sports. Yes, practice does make perfect, but without intuitive skills to be the foundation of practice, an athlete will not be as successful. Evidence of my point I’ve seen on my own hockey team. The girls who intuitively have a general understanding of hockey and key concepts in hockey are the ones with the most success while those who didn’t go into the sport with natural intuitions about the sport did not go as far. Of course, with practice, the intuitive girls learned to use their skills and excelled even more, as did the less intuitive girls. However, the girls with intuition attained more with the combination of intuition and practice. I have to say I agree with the graph and text indicating that practice – as opposed to one’s genes – make perfect. Practice is another key factor that divides the amateurs from the pros. For example, pianists who spent more and more time practicing as they aged are now considered experts, while pianists who spent the same amount of time on piano as they aged did not exceed the title of “amateur”. This is also why the athletes whose parents started them at a very young age seem to be the ones we watch in the Olympics or in the major leagues. Their years of training more and more over their lifetime are a key part of what got them where they want to be. To further illustrate the idea that intuition plays a key part in athletic ability, we can look at the story of Holm and Thomas in which innate talent seemed to override honed skill in the high jump sport. Regardless of the fact that Holm had spent years training for high jump while Thomas had spent months, Thomas ended up as world champion because of intuition and natural ability which plays a slightly larger part in athletic ability than practice. It is evident here in that the amount of practice time made no difference while the huge gap between the men was the level of natural ability that Thomas possessed and Holm apparently lacked. Thus, I do believe there could be such a thing as the Matthew effect, for natural ability is the foundation upon which athletic ability builds up over time. Those with natural ability start at a higher level and can excel quicker than those lacking natural ability and intuition. I also agree with David Epstein’s claim that visual activity augments success in sports. One sport where visual activity is essential if not most important is hockey. As we all know, the objective in hockey is to score more than your opponents, and the key to scoring is visual activity. Take Tomas Holmstrom, a retired Red Wing famous for his tipping skills – he can use his stick quite well to redirect pucks coming at him at speeds of up to 100 mph. Without a high visual capacity, he certainly would not be capable of this. (To watch a video of Holmstrom’s tipping skills, click here: http://video.nhl.com/videocenter/console?id=149717.)