“Champions aren’t made in gyms. Champions are made from something they have deep inside them – a desire, a dream, a vision.”--Muhammad Ali.
In this chapter on vision, we are going to go broad and we are going to go narrow. We will fly at the 30,000 foot level and zoom low as well. We are going to focus and we are going to scan. With that context, I want to spend some time identifying the many and various types of vision that I have found important to peak performance.
1. Visual Acuity: Let’s be real. You must start here, of course. Most, if not all sports, require excellent visual acuity, or clarity of vision. Physically, athletes must be able to see clearly and also have excellent hand/eye coordination.
This ability allows a baseball player to hit a fastball, the quarterback to “thread the needle” when passing the football, or an ice hockey player to find his teammate for an assisted goal. Think: Ted Williams, Henry Aaron, Drew Brees, Wayne Gretzky, Babe Ruth.
Great vision comes down to science. Humans as well as other mammals experience the five senses because of specialized cells throughout our body called sensory receptors, which transmit everything you feel, hear, smell, taste and see to your brain.
Of all the sensory receptors we have, 70 percent are in our eyes alone. That’s 260 million (130 million per eye) receptors taking information in through the eyes and sending it to the brain, by way of 2.4 million nerve fibers.
This adds up to our eyes sending our brain an estimated 109 gigabytes of data every second.
Most of us can process that—and a lot of it is selectively ignored by our brain—but it’s elite athletes who can process sensory information the fastest who are among the most successful.
In 1921, researchers from Columbia University’s psychology department performed some studies of baseball's Hall of Famer Babe Ruth. They found that he had one of the most remarkable sets of eyes—and one of the most athletic brains—in existence at the time. He processed visual information 12 percent faster than normal men, and compared to the normal man, Babe’s visual perception occurred 150 percent faster.
Ted Williams, the Hall of Fame baseball player, had 20/10 vision.
The world seems to move in slow motion for such athletes because their brain is working at warp speed, particularly visual input.
2. Mental Clarity: Great athletes also have the gift of vision that refers to the concept of mental clarity. As with any type of goal, the more specific and clear the goal is, the more likely it is to be worked on and achieved. The clarity of the goal requires a high degree of specificity, “measurability,” attainability, realism, timeliness and relevance. These characteristics of clarity are often referred to as SMART goals.
3. Long-Range - Seeing The Big Picture: This type of vision refers to the ability to conjure up a long-range vision of yourself and your abilities. It is what you strive for.
If you can’t see it in your mind’s eye, you won’t be able to achieve it. Some people call this the dream, the ultimate challenge or the end game. Think Muhammad Ali, of course.
4. Short-Range: Desired goals/objectives: this type of vision seems fairly obvious. It is the big picture broken down into chunks. However, I want to emphasize that it is an important part of any preparation that an athlete attempts. Any time spent in serious preparation must be tied to a set of smaller goals. This type of vision is associated with either developmental or performance goals.
Developmental goals are those that help determine practice or rehearsal activities. Performance goals are those that are associated with game or match performance activities.
5. Peripheral: this type of vision involves the awareness of your surroundings, teammates, opponents. It is the opposite of tunnel vision. This type of vision sees the whole field or court in real time. It goes beyond self-involvement. With this type of vision, the athlete is oriented in the moment, he/she is fully present and totally engaged. Think Leo Messi.
6. Intelligent (Sport-Specific): This type of vision requires the full understanding of the game itself, and an awareness of the need to identify, study and master various components of the game. With this type of vision, the athlete is able to conceptualize and have a mental model for their role and function as a teammate and the role and function of others. This is the type of vision that turns data into information, awareness into action. Think Peyton Manning or Tim Duncan.
7. Anticipatory: This type of vision provides the ability to predict and see the court, the field, or the ice beyond the present or real time. It involves the skill of recognition. This ability is what Wayne Gretzky, the Hall of Fame professional hockey player called Fast Forwarding. The faster the recognition, the better the performance.
“I skate to where the puck is going to be.”-- Wayne Gretzky, NHL Hall of Famer.
“Fast-Forwarding”: Learning From the Great One
Even in his prime, Gretzky wasn’t very fast, his shot was oddly weak, and he was last in the team in strength training. He would operate from his “office,” the small space in the back of the opponent’s goal, anticipating where his team would be well before they got there and feeding them passes so unsuspected he would often surprise them. For a cover story in 1985 he told Time, “People talk about skating, puck handling and shooting but the whole sport is angles and caroms, forgetting the straight direction the puck is going, calculating where it will be diverted, factoring in all the interruptions.”
What Wayne Gretzky described above is called “fast-forwarding” (Sashittal & Jassawalla, 2002) or the ability to travel forward in time and predict where, after seemingly infinite combinations of ricochets and caroms, the puck will emerge-the ability to make his way to the precise spot.
Fast-forwarding in sports involves the ability to anticipate the flow of play and stay ahead of real time. Athletes who fast-forward, anticipate where teammates and the competition are going to be. Using this technique provides a competitive advantage and makes other teammates’ performances better. Through this fast-forwarding they are able to achieve peak performance, inspire others to greater performance and motivate others through their focus and intensity.
In all walks of life, “fast-forwarding” is about anticipation, being steps ahead of others in real time. It requires skills of mental imagery and visualization.
8. Intuitive: This type of vision requires a belief in the importance of tapping into consciousness, including the unconscious, preconscious and subconscious. It involves the ability to be psychologically-minded. This aspect of performance suggests that we have the ability to access seemingly inaccessible thoughts, skills, competencies, and abilities. This belief allows great athletes to obtain mentally and emotionally what they need to achieve and be successful especially when they need to be.
9. Instinctual: The type of vision allows us the self-knowledge and awareness to access and use what is “pre-wired” into us whether it be genetic, biological, evolutionary, or developmental. It helps us to access what we have inside of us. It allows us to use the gifts that we have been given. It taps into our athletic DNA, Great athletes can quickly identify patterns that they have seen before. It is an athletic sense of recognition.
10. Neural: Muscle Memory
This type of vision is critical and complementary to instinct. We can best utilize, develop and leverage our instinct by building our muscle memory. By understanding the importance of deliberate practice and rehearsal we can leverage and unlock what is programmed within us. This ability allows the athlete to recall and execute quickly and immediately perform what is required because it has been deeply encoded and learned fully. Think Steph Curry.
11. Centering: Quieting the Cognitive Mind
This type of vision requires the development of mindfulness and the practice of sports-oriented meditation. Great athletes are able to reduce or eliminate chatter as they perform. Great athletes understand the need for removing cognitive barriers to performance. Quieting the chatter positions the athlete for success by establishing the requirements of being present and in the moment. Think Michael Phelps.
Can you see the importance of each type of vision? Can you think of other examples of these types of vision? Can you think of other athletes that utilize each type of vision?
Serena Williams: Success with the Quiet Eye
In the 2003 Australian Open, professional tennis player Serena Wiliams was down 5-2 in the final set to Kim Clisters. Rather than slipping into panic mode or despair, she saved two match points before winning the next five games. Somehow, each serve and each return landed just where she wanted them to – and she would ultimately go on to win the whole tournament. Williams has since made similar comebacks at the Australian Open in 2005, at Wimbledon in 2009, and at the China Open in 2014, managing to pull back even when her opponents are serving a match point. In each case, the extreme pressure, rather than causing her to fold, only seemed to sharpen her focus and concentration.
Fortunately for the rest of us, psychologists and neuroscientists have now identified some of the common mental processes that mark out elite athletes such as Williams. And one of the most intriguing aspects appears to be a phenomenon known as the “quiet eye” – a kind of enhanced visual perception that allows the athlete to eliminate any distractions as they plan their next move.
Intriguingly, the quiet eye appears to be particularly important at times of stress, preventing the athlete from ‘choking’ at moments of high pressure. It may even be related to the mysterious but much desired ‘flow state’.
The same laser-sharp focus can help doctors maintain their focus as they perform keyhole surgery, and it is of increasing interest to the military.
“There is a small window of opportunity for the motor system to receive information from the eyes, and experts have found a better way to optimise that window and to keep that window [open], which helps their movements to be really accurate and really precise.” - Sam Vine, University of Exeter.
The concept of quiet eye originates with the personal experiences of kinesiologist Joan Vickers. As a student in sports science – and an athlete herself – Vickers always had been interested in how our athletic performance varies so much.
While playing on the university basketball team, for instance, she once scored an extraordinary 27 points within the first half of a match. Another time, she had a stunning winning streak while serving for the university volleyball team.
But both of Vickers’ miraculous performances were one-offs – each time, her magic touch disappeared the next day. “It kept on running around my head – how could I have done that? Physically I didn’t change,” she says. On the other hand, why were the elite athletes she envied not only so good, but also so consistent?
While working on a PhD at the University of British Columbia, Vickers began to suspect the secret lay in the way that elite athletes see the world. She hooked a group of professional golfers up to a device that precisely monitored their eye movements as they putted their balls. She found an intriguing correlation: the better the player (as measured by their golfing handicap) the longer and steadier their gaze on the ball just before, and then during, their strike. Lesser skilled players, by contrast, tended to shift their focus between different areas of the scene, with each fixation lasting for shorter periods of time.
The general idea that you should ‘keep your eye on the ball’ is well-known, of course – but this suggested something more intricate, with the precise onset and duration of the gaze correlating with an objective measure of sporting success. The finding was also at odds with the equally prevalent assumption that expertise comes from more rapid mental processing. According to Vickers' results, the expert athlete actually slowed down their thinking at the crucial moment.
“I knew I was seeing something that no one had ever seen before,” says Vickers, now a professor at the University of Calgary. “I felt like Columbus or the Vikings.”
The quiet eye has since been observed in many other sports, including basketball, volleyball, football, tennis, archery, and ice hockey. Needless to say, the exact location of the gaze depends on the task in question. During a free throw in basketball, for instance, the gaze needs to land on the front of the hoop’s rim; for a soccer penalty kick, it should be on the top left or right corner of the net; and for an ice hockey goalkeeper, their gaze lingers on the puck just before their opponent released it from the stick. In each case, a steadier final fixation, just before the critical moment, marks out the expert athlete, who holds their gaze for 62% longer than novices. Crucially, the differences in this dwell time of the quiet eye don’t just predict the overall differences between elite and novice players; fluctuations in the onset and duration of the quiet eye can also explain lapses in the athlete’s individual performance, which would again reaffirm the idea that it is itself a critical part of the mental processes.
Camilo Sáenz-Moncaleano, who recently researched tennis players, suspects that most athletes had not made a conscious decision to change their eye movements; for many it’s probably a behavior that they picked up implicitly.
“They won’t know the name of the term, but they know how to do it,” he says. “It’s a natural thing.”
Fortunately, the quiet eye can be taught and learned. In one of the first tests of quiet eye training, Vickers took a university basketball team and hooked them up to her eye-tracking devices so that they could become more aware of their gaze as they practiced ‘free throws’.
By the end of the second season, the team had reached a level of accuracy that was even higher than the NBA average. Their performance improved – by 22% – over the next two seasons, compared to an 8% improvement in a control group. By the end of the second season, the team had reached a level of accuracy that was even higher than the NBA average.
Quiet eye training has since helped many other amateur and professional athletes – including national volleyball teams and Olympic skeet shooters – to achieve their potential. A recent meta-analysis confirms that the quiet eye is a strong and highly consistent effect. In 2017, the European Journal of Sport Science devoted a whole issue to exploring the phenomenon.
Given that the differences in quiet eye can last a fraction of a second, the current training current relies on the feedback from expensive gaze-tracking equipment, meaning that the benefits are currently out of most athlete’s reach. Sáenz-Moncaleano, however, points out the technology is developing rapidly. It’s possible that future progress in consumer technology might open up quiet eye training for everyone. “The merge of VR and eye tracking could be a game changer,” he says.
In the meantime, many of the scientists are aiming to build their theoretical understanding of the phenomenon, which remains somewhat hazy. This is partly due to the practical difficulties of looking deeper inside the athlete’s brain as they practice their sport; we don’t yet have accurate fMRI scanners portable enough to take to training sessions, for instance, that might help pinpoint neurological mechanisms. Even so, the scientists broadly agree that it revolves around advanced intelligence gathering.
Sáenz-Moncaleano puts it, the quiet eye allows you to “soak in all the information from the object in question” which “helps you to produce the best motor response”. And the very latest research would suggest that this period of focus is especially crucial in high-stakes situations, preventing the athlete from ‘choking’.
Quiet Eye and the Zone
Exeter researchers have found that the quiet eye duration correlates with self-reported feelings of ‘flow’ or ‘being in the zone’ – the sensation of effortless concentration, in which your mind is clear of everything except the task at hand. The quiet eye also seems to coincide with other physiological changes throughout the body. The heart rate temporarily decelerates, for instance, and the movement of the limbs themselves become smoother. All of this might seem to support the idea that the quiet eye filters distraction and calms the mind and the body at the critical moment, even under stress.
Vine cautions that we should be wary of assigning too much importance to the quiet eye; many other factors will contribute to sports performance under pressure. But it would certainly seem to be a key component of the extreme focus and mental resilience that athletes such as Williams often describe.
Williams herself understands what is most important in her game, a calm, steady focus.
“I’ve won most of my matches – probably all of my grand slams – because of what’s upstairs, not anything else,” Williams told Sports Illustrated in 2015. “If you are behind in a game, it’s so important to relax, and that’s what I do – when I’m behind in a game, that’s when I become most relaxed,” she added. “Just focus on one point at a time… just that sole point, and then the next one, and the next one.”
Scanning
“Pictures! Pictures!”
That was what Frank Lampard,Jr., three-time Chelsea Player of the Year, grew up hearing his father, Frank Lampard, Sr., shout from the sidelines. Lampard, Sr. appeared in 551 games for West Ham United. This was not your typical sports parent screaming misinformed, discrepant nonsense from the bleachers.
The elder Lampard encouraged his son to take frequent mental “pictures” of his surroundings so he could act quickly and decisively once he received the ball.
“I knew it was very important, from my own playing career,” Lampard, Sr. said. “I was probably annoying him, but I knew it was important.
“All the best players do this naturally. Or should I say it looks natural, because it will have been drummed into them from a young age…....It’s crucial, because the higher you go, the less time you have on the ball. You need to gather all of the information you can before receiving the ball, so you can make quick decisions once you have it.”
With his father’s help, Lampard, Jr., became a wizard on the field. His skill as a playmaker relied on constantly having his head on a swivel:
Arsène Wenger, legendary former manager of Arsenal, calls this regular check on one’s surroundings “scanning.”
“I have lost many top players because their head was on the ball and they were not seeing what was around them. Great players isolate from the ball, their head is like a radar,” Wenger said.
“The problem in football is that you learn how to play [the wrong] way round—first execution, then decision making and perception last…Once a circuit is printed in their brain, we managers find it extremely difficult to change that.”
Furthermore, scanning is about creating neural pathways in the brain.
“Once a circuit is printed in their brain, we managers find it extremely difficult to change that. It’s vital not to harm the perception with young boys because they learn first the execution from five to 12.
“As a player, whenever I get the ball I have to analyse, then decide and finally execute. Perception plays a huge role in this. I worked with a University in Norway to identify how I could improve perception.
“Basically, I came to the conclusion that it is about getting as much information as possible before I get the ball. I call that scanning. I try to see what happens to a player in the 10 seconds before he gets the ball, how many times he takes information and the quality of information he takes. It depends on the position.
“What is interesting is that very good players scan six to eight times in the 10 seconds before getting the ball and normal ones three to four times. That is a major step for improvement.
“However, more important - you have to analyse the quality of perception and decision making. My challenge is to get my players to know which the best choice is and make the optimal decision every time they get the ball.
“The player has to scan and decide. When he has decided he has to make the best possible solution. This means a compromise between risk and the progress of the ball,” said Wegner.
Dr. Geir Jordet, a professor with the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences, is the leading researcher on the topic of scanning. He completed both his Masters thesis and PhD on the role of vision, perception and anticipation in elite performance.
In one study, Jordet examined the “visual exploratory behaviors,” which he defines as “body and head movements initiated to better see their surroundings.”
A study of 118 different English Premier League midfielders and forwards across 64 unique games looked at the skill of scanning. Dr. Jordet was particularly interested in these movements during the 10-second period before a player received a pass, and only if those passes had advanced the ball upfield.
Dr. Jordet found that players in the highest visual exploration group completed 17% more of their total passes—and 33% more of their forward passes in the opposition’s half—than players in the lowest visual exploration group. Of the 118 included players, Lampard and Steven Gerrard averaged the most searches per second before receiving the ball, with .62 and .61, respectively.
The high scanners were found to have an 81% pass completion, compared to 64% for the low scanners. In a further sample of 55 players, the high scanners had 75% successful forward passes, compared to 41% for the low scanners.
Jordet has cited a video clip from Chelsea’s 5-0 home win against Blackburn in October 2009 as an outstanding example of scanning. Lampard is seen to look around 10 times in seven seconds before receiving the ball. He then jinks round one man, who he had seen coming, before playing the pass, exhibiting what must have seemed to his opponents to be a sixth sense.
Xavi Hernandez (affectionately known as Xavi), a well-known soccer legend, while not included in this particular study, was found to average an absurd .83 searchers per second. That comes out to 8.3 “scans” during the 10 seconds before he receives a pass.
“Think quickly, look for spaces. That’s what I do: look for spaces. All day. I’m always looking. All day, all day,” Xavi said in 2011. “Here? No. There? No. People who haven’t played don’t always realize how hard that is. Space, space, space. It’s like being on the PlayStation. I think ‘S—, the defender’s here, play it there.’ I see the space and pass. That’s what I do.”
Obviously, simply swiveling your head won’t translate to improved decision-making if you’re not using that perceptual information to quickly inform your next decision. But frequently examining where teammates, opponents and boundaries are in relation to yourself—and using that information wisely—certainly seems to be an edge utilized by many elite players.
Cesc Fàbregas, an experienced Spanish professional footballer who plays as a central midfielder for Ligue 1 club Monaco and the Spain national team, is another example of a great scanner.
“What is interesting is that very good players scan six to eight times in the 10 seconds before getting the ball and normal ones three to four times. That is a major step for improvement. However, more important, you have to analyze the quality of perception and decision making. My challenge is to get my players to know which the best choice is and make the optimal decision every time they get the ball,” Wenger says. “The player has to scan and decide. When he has decided he has to make the best possible solution. This means a compromise between risk and the progress of the ball.”
Experts like Wenger and Jordet emphasize that the earlier a player develops this skill, the better.
So, how does a youth coach go about doing this? Keith Whitmer, a USSF A Licensed Coach and head coach for the DMCV Sharks club team, likes to remind players to “check (their) shoulder.” This helps them get their eyes off the ball and onto a huge swath of field which includes areas in front of, next to and behind them.
“A cue like ‘check your shoulder’ actually encourages the player to make a choice by revealing to them the options they have at their disposal. It will encourage the player to make a choice, and often, this choice will come from the skillset a player has. Some may pass, some may dribble, but they will have made a choice. And they can learn from that,” Whitmer says.
Or, as Lampard’s dad liked to say, “Pictures, Pictures.”
How Do You Teach It?
Jordet bumped into Lampard and asked him why he was so good at scanning. The England midfielder was slightly mystified, replying: “I guess I was born with it.”
As Ben Lyttleton points out in his book, Edge, this can be the problem with elite players (who also often make poor coaches and commentators) - they are frequently not able to explain why they are good at something, because they do it intuitively.
However, when the Norwegian asked West Ham Academy Manager Tony Carr about Lampard’s special skill, he was illuminating.
“In the first game Frank played for West Ham, his dad would sit in the stands and shout at his son all the time,” Carr explained. “He’d say the same thing, every time - ‘Pictures! Pictures!’ He just wanted Frank to have a picture in his head before he got the ball.”
TGG phoned the former West Ham assistant Frank Lampard, Sr Snr to ask more about this.
“I didn’t know it was called scanning, but I knew it was very important, from my own playing career” Lampard Sr.
“That’s why I was shouting ‘pictures’ at Frank from the sidelines. I can remember it now. I was probably annoying him, but I knew it was important."
“All the best players do this naturally. Or I should say it looks natural, because it will have been drummed into them from a young age.
“It’s crucial, because the higher you go, the less time you have on the ball. You need to gather all of the information you can before receiving the ball, so you can make quick decisions once you have it.”
Former Manchester United Under-18s coach Paul McGuinness, who is now a coach educator for the Football Association, said that legendary youth coach Eric Harrison did the same. He drilled this into the likes of Paul Scholes and David Beckham during sessions at The Cliff.
“Look at someone like Paul Scholes - one of the greatest central midfielders ever to play the game,” McGuinness said. “Look at how he’d scan the play before receiving the ball. That was crucial to his game and you could trace it all the way back to the sessions he’d had with Eric.”
Use of Technology
Frank Lampard, Sr. was teaching his son about scanning, or ‘pictures,’ 30 years ago, as was Harrison at Manchester United. Now technology could have a role to play though.
Andy Etches, Sports Director for elite football virtual reality product Mi Hiepa, told us they have two specific drills based around perception and decision making.
“It’s not just about moving the head,” Etches said, “the crucial thing is that the player sees things and makes decisions based on that.
“With Mi Hiepa, we are able to directly measure what people are seeing through head tracking and eye tracking. We can add match scenarios, false pressure and distractions.
“Then we have biometric markers we can measure and track. We’ve seen that the best players are outstanding in perception and decision making and, as Arsene Wenger says, this is something that needs to be learnt and practiced from a young age.”
“Mini-Game” Training
Most athletes love sports in all forms, playing them, watching them, and immersing themselves in video game versions. For many young athletes, this binging obsession carries over into miniaturized forms of a given sport, as well. While these “mini-games” might be written off by some as frivolous, the role they played during the childhood and adolescence of many of the greatest athletes on earth cannot be ignored.
Technology can be a great way to hone hand-eye or foot-eye coordination and become more agile with an implement. The environment that often accompanies these “mini” games is also quite different from what you’ll find in the “real” version of the sport, which can be a more holistic benefit. We’ll get into that later, but let’s start by outlining some classic mini equivalents of popular sports.
There are few NHL players who didn’t grow up playing hundreds of hours of “knee hockey” or “mini stick” in some musty basement. Justin Bourne, writer for The Athletic and former minor league hockey player, claims the game has been “played by nearly everyone with even a passing interest in hockey.”
“A lot of free play helps build confidence and skills in handling the puck. That free play can even be with the mini hockey sticks, with a ball and a small stick, because it’s still managing a bouncing ball and working on hand-eye coordination,” Rick Trupp, Alaska Coach-in-Chief for USA Hockey, told USAHockey.com. “It’s building soft hands, developing rhythm in your hands, and developing that hand-eye coordination.”
Futsal is a scaled-down version of soccer wildly popular in South America and southern Europe. It features a smaller ball plus a reduced court and goal size. Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo played it obsessively during their days as amateurs, and they’re quick to credit futsal with playing a key role in their development.
“As a little boy in Argentina, I played futsal on the streets and for my club. It was tremendous fun, and it really helped me become who I am today,” Messi told FIFA.com in 2012.
Of course, simply playing with a mini soccer ball can confer many of the same benefits. Dragging our family’s mini hockey nets over to our neighbor’s front yard and using them with a mini soccer ball for games of 2-on-2 or 3v3 with no goalies is a common neighborhood activity all over the world.
Aspiring baseball players in the Dominican Republic obsessively play a game called “vitilla.” It swaps out the traditional baseball bat for a broomstick, and the traditional ball for the cap of a water jug. To make things even more challenging for the hitter, the cap can dart around like a Wiffle ball on a windy day:
“That thing can really move funny, and it’s great training for the eyes. Any Dominican major league player who says he never played vitilla is lying,” says four-time MLB All-Star José Reyes.
Aside from America, no other country produces more MLB players than the Caribbean nation with a population about half the state of Florida’s. There were 102 players born in the Dominican Republic on Opening Day rosters this year. America might not have a “vitilla” equivalent in our culture, but many young ball players do practice hitting small objects with a skinny implement.
“My dad used to get broomsticks and pieces of cork—fishing cork, whatever it was. Then he’d wrap the cork up in tape so it was heavy enough that the wind wouldn’t blow it too crazy. Then he would just flick the corks at me, and he’d tell me to hit them with the broomstick. I used to do that a lot; that was one thing I did a whole lot,” says five-time MLB All-Star and four-time Silver Slugger award-winner Andrew McCutchen.
NBA superstar Kawhi Leonard is a mini hoop fanatic. He had a Nerf hoop in his college dorm at San Diego State and constantly practiced drilling shots with his left hand. “In every house I’ve ever been to, (Kawhi) always had a mini hoop. You can only play with your left hand. You can’t play with your right hand. That’s a really cool thing because he’s working on his game even when he’s just at the house,” former SDSU team manager Alex Van Houten said.
Whenever guests came over, Leonard challenged them to a left-handed free-throw contest. “He had a Nerf goal on the back of the door in his apartment, and he would just shoot. Friends would come over, playing 2K, and he would challenge us to a free-throw contest,” said former SDSU guard LaBradford Franklin. The habit continued well into his NBA career, and for all we know, Kawhi still has a mini hoop in his home today. So, does emerging star Nikola Jokic of the NBA Denver Nuggets.
What about a mini football? Sure, what American kid hasn’t tried to throw a Nerf football over their own roof? The U.S. military once built a prototype grenade using a hollowed-out Nerf football because throwing such an object felt so natural for American kids. Many NFL receivers often throw miniature footballs rather than real ones to help improve their focus and tracking.
The potential skill development of these mini games is fairly obvious. Smaller implements usually require greater hand-eye or foot-eye coordination and dexterity than larger ones. Limited space or goal size often demands more creative offense. But beyond that, the environment these games are played in by youngsters is often just what they need.
It’s usually just a kid (or group of kids) having fun and playing just for the sake of play. They laugh. They experiment. They get lots and lots of touches. There’s no joysticking coaches or parents telling them what to do, and there’s no fear of failure. Does it get competitive? Absolutely. But kids have a natural compass that helps them find the perfect balance between competition and fun. In this day and age, such play has become increasingly rare. The free time kids used to spend playing this sort of stuff is now being filled with private lessons, travel teams, showcases and tournaments (along with all the time spent traveling to and from these events).
“(Mini sticks) involved friends, playing, competing, but all without the pressures of coaches and practices and frankly, rules. You know, the stuff that ruins most children’s sports. What more could a kid want?” says Bourne.