Sport And Exercise Psychology: A Critical Introduction

Box 6.4 Do anticipatory abilities develop over time?

In sport, the term “anticipation” refers to an athlete’s ability to predict task-relevant
events accurately. Although it is well known that top performers are adept at this skill,
little research has been conducted on whether or not this skill develops over time.
Therefore, in an effort to fill this gap in the literature, Tenenbaum, Sar-El and Bar-Eli
(2000) explored how visual anticipatory abilities developed in young tennis players of
different skill levels over time. Using a temporal occlusion paradigm (described earlier in
the chapter), high- and low-skilled tennis players from the Israeli Academy of Tennis
watched specially prepared video segments and had to predict the final ball location after
various tennis strokes (e.g., a backhand down the line, a serve) had been executed by
model players, Results showed that, as expected, the more skilful players anticipated ball
location more accurately than did less proficient performers. However, contrary to the
theory of Ericsson et at. (1993) (see later in the chapter) some differences in visual
anticipatory abilities were found to exist between the players of different skill levels from
the earliest stages of their development. These latter differences suggest that deliberate
practice alone cannot account for differences in anticipation skills in young tennis
players. Therefore, Tenenbaum et al. (2000) concluded that “extensive practice is a
necessary but not a sufficient condition for developing highly skilled performance” (p.
126),

Expertise in sport is domain-specific

Research suggests, as mentioned earlier in this section, that the skills of expert athletes
tend to be “domain-specific” or confined to one area. In other words, few of the specialist
skills acquired by expert athletes transfer to other sporting fields. At first glance, this
finding is surprising as it challenges the existence of sporting “all rounders” or athletes
who appear to be capable of achieving expert-level performance in several different
sports simultaneously. On closer scrutiny, however, the domain-specificity of athletic
skills is not completely surprising. After all, consider the case of Michael Jordan who was
one of the greatest basketballers of all time. In the late 1990s, he retired from basketball
and tried to become a professional baseball player. Unfortunately, his involvement with
this new sport was not a success by his standards and he failed to attain his desired level
of expertise in it. Anecdotally, similar experiences are evident in the case of several
world-class athletes who tried to become successful golfers on the professional tour (see
Capostagno, 2002). Among these former athletes are Nigel Mansell (former Formula One
world champion), Ivan Lendl (a former world number one tennis player in the 1980s) and
Julian Dicks (a former West Ham soccer star). Of course, we must be cautious about
extrapolating from anecdotal examples. Also, we must be careful to point out that some
sports stars do indeed become skilled exponents of another game. For example, Mats
Wilander, the former tennis star, is an excellent golfer. Nevertheless, research suggests
that top athletes rarely achieve equivalent levels of expertise in sports outsider their own
specialist domain—unless there is a substantial level of overlap between the skills

Sport and exercise psychology: A critical introduction 170