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As a child, the minute I could walk and hold something, there was always a sports ball or bat in my hands. As I got older, softball became my main focus. I played for club teams until joining a traveling team in high school. I played for my high school, but my traveling team helped me improve.

I've always described myself more as a contact hitter, despite my ability to hit home runs. I rarely would strike out. This was the case until my sophomore year in high school. During my traveling team's season, I struck out over 40 times. That was more than my total strikeouts from both my high school and traveling teams' seasons combined for freshman year. To try to help with my batting struggles, my traveling team coaches decided to record my tee batting practice. The camera was set up behind me as I took full swings. For point of contact swings, or half swings, the camera was set up across from me in the left batter's box, positioned slightly in front of me. This was done so my coaches could break down where my swings were going wrong. The video showed how my body didn't stay centered when starting my swing. This would lead to dropping or raising my hands depending on which way my body was leaning towards. Dropping hands typically leads to a golf like swing, resulting in swing under the ball  or pop ups. While raising hands would lead to swing over the ball or ground balls. This video feedback guided my practice for the entire offseason. The next season, I had my highest batting average ever recorded. I batted over .700, with only one strikeout. Only knowledge of results or knowledge of performance verbal feedback could not help increase my performance. The incorporation of both video and verbal knowledge of performance types of augmented feedback increased my learning and performance.

I chose this gif to demonstrate what I looked like when my coaches broke down how one small aspect changed my entire swing from the video.

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Whether it be the movies, certain restaurants, or sports bars like Dave & Buster's, the arcade room always caught my eyes. They caught every kid's eyes. Pinball, skeeball, racing games, you name it. Growing up, the only thing in the way between me and the glorious arcade games were my practical parents. My brother and I would beg until they would give us each $1 to play. When we were younger, we would waste the dollar on whichever game first caught our eye. As we got older, our competitive nature increased. It was always about who won. There was only one game that was a winner takes all for us: Pop-a-Shot. It is your typical basketball arcade game where you try to make as many shots as possible during the game. For years, I would lose every time. I always considered my losses because my brother's better basketball skills. My brother and I had the same play style, shoot as fast as you can to get as many shots off within the game. More shots, more chances for points, right? Wrong. Fitt's law explains that increasing speed decreases accuracy. So by increasing my speed to shoot shots, I was actually decreasing my accuracy and the amount of shots I could make. Playing Pop-a Shot has become a tradition between my brother and I, especially when we started to only see each other over holidays and breaks. After learning about Fitt's Law this past fall, I decided to test it out for our Pop-a-Shot game. This game I slowed down my shot speed enough to be able to maintain a good enough pace to compete. The game was neck and neck until my brother hit a buzzer beating shot to seal his undefeated winning streak. Despite still losing, the speed-accuracy trade off is still effective. This was the closest game ever between the two us.

I chose this gif because it almost exactly portrays my brother and I after every Pop-a-Shot match.

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The mechanics of every aspect of a sport are important. The off season for softball practice consisted of a lot of tuning the mechanics. We'd work on throwing, different types of throws, running, and anything that had many elements that needed to be worked on. The mechanics of batting is was heavily broken down and practiced.  Every practice was two hours. Unless it was a situational day of practice, every practice was set up with at least an hour of batting practice. Some days longer, but never less. The way my coaches set up batting practice was by setting up stations. Each station focused on a different aspect of batting. Some stations would be the swing broken down by parts. For example, there would be point of contact swings, stop after making contact swings, stop at extension swings, and finally full swings. While stations altered aspects of the swing to further improve the mechanics. For example, the "Ichiro" station would be a normal full swing, except you'd repeat moving your front batting leg three times before swinging. This is aimed at helping maintain a center body when swinging. It is easy to want to lean back or shift the center of your body when doing this drill. Being able to do this drill correctly makes it easier when needing to do full swings. The way my coaches set up batting practice fully demonstrates the importance of partial practice on more complex skills. Only performing whole practice, or full swings, allows for many elements to get overlooked. The breaking down of the swing allows for each element to improved. With each element improving, the entire swing improves. Performance will likely increase.

I chose this gif because the pop culture movie references the significance of partial practice. The stations at practice sometimes can feel irrelevant to batting, but are important to the skill.

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One of my favorite jobs ever having was working for Sil's Mini Donuts. As you could guess, they sell mini donuts. The average customer will always talk about how easy the job must be. From their view all they see is a couple workers standing behind the donut machine as it pops out lines of donuts. The machine drops the dough, flips the donuts midway through, and flips them into a tray. It's like magic to the customer and has all their attention. I call this the donut gaze. The customers get so mesmerized by the donut machine that they pay attention to nothing else. So much that we end up having to call them to keep moving and pick up their donuts. What they don't see is literally everything that makes the magic happen.

An ideal ratio of workers to donut machines is at least three workers for one machine. Ideal doesn't always work out...a lot. More times than I'd like there's only e another coworker to do all the tasks and keep the machine running. During a busy, understaffed shift, I typically am running the show. One worker is usually at the register majority of the time, leaving everything else for me. This means making dough, making sure there is always enough dough, making sure the machine is working properly, flipping donuts that don't end up flipping automatically, bagging the donuts, and sugar them. All these aspects require my attention non-stop. Without paying attention to each aspect, something would go wrong. No dough means no donuts. If you don't watch the donuts, there is a high chance some might not have flipped and won't be cooked all the way. These donuts get thrown away. When it's busy, we can't keep throwing donuts away and keeping the line long. A lot of times I find myself always slightly watching the machine as I bag donuts, then after adding sugar checking again. Every five minutes or so I make sure to check the dough to know when I have start making it. Slipping and forgetting little aspects always results in some time big mistake. Whether it be a donut pile up on the first half of the machine from the donuts not flipping or running out of dough, a time consuming mistake always happens.

All theories on attention have at least one commonality, which is that the attention capacity is fixed and there is a limit. Theories differ on how attention is divided and what not. In relation to my job, the central-resource theory on attention helps explain how things end up going wrong. The theory explains that there is a central attention capacity for all tasks. Once it is filled up, there is no more attention available. This is how I am able to pay attention to multiple aspects of work, but once it is filled I cannot add to it. This is when the donuts start misbehaving and not flipping or the dough runs out.

I've selected this gif because there because once something goes wrong, I have this brief moment where I game plan where my attention goes. There's a lot of things going on, but my attention needs to be divided efficiently.

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I Don't Say This Often, But You Were Right Dad...

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I Don't Say This Often, But You Were Right Dad...

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I like the theory that you want what you cant have in life. Softball was my main focus in high school. I was essentially training to play in college. My parents were lenient in what I could do, but my dad had one rule. No playing golf. I probably could do anything and he wouldn't be too mad. Golf though, he'd be furious. He was worried swing golf clubs would mess with my softball swing. As most kids do, I did the one thing I was told I couldn't do. After school one day, I went to a driving range with some friends who were on the golf teams. My theory was that because I was good at hitting a fast moving softball, I'd be good at hitting a golf ball as well. How hard could it be to a stationary ball from a tee? I found out very quickly it was not as easy at it seems. My first two swings were misses, never even touched the ball.  Third swing I hit the ball. However, it hit the wood blocker that protects the person next to me and flew back at me. The fourth and final golf swing I took actually left the tee box. It was like a ground ball, but the golf kind. My theory reflected positive feedback; however the results demonstrated that negative transfer occurred. While both sports involve the concept of swinging an object to hit another object, the movements are different. A friend also pointed out that my hand placement on the club was not accurate. It reflected how to hold a bat, not a club. The swing and hand positions are just two ways that softball negatively transfers over to golf.

I chose this gif to demonstrate why baseball/softball players shouldn't play golf. It doesn't turn out too well.