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Growing up, softball was the only sport I ever really got into. I did play volleyball for a few years in middle school, but softball was the first sport I joined a team for, at the young age of 8, and was the sport I continued playing throughout middle school and part of high school. Despite playing for several years, I never found what position was best for me until my last year or two of playing. However, one position that I tried for a while was pitching, even going so far as to attend special classes and sessions on pitching skills.
One thing that was stressed to us from early on was working on being accurate with our pitches, trying to hit as close to the strike zone as possible. We would try to hit the same spot that our catchers were signaling to us every time, and we would do this at several distances away from the target instead of pitching from the normal distance every time. This was great for working on our technique and our muscle memory of the pitch, but telling a 10 year old to work on being accurate is an extremely hard task when that 10 year old goes home and watches their favorite Milwaukee Brewers pitchers regularly throw 90mph fastballs pitch after pitch. When would I be that fast? How am I supposed to be that fast if I'm stuck working on accuracy?
It's probably a good thing that little 10 year old me was not trying to pitch as fast as I could, because knowing me, most of those pitches would probably end up either in the dirt or soaring above the batter's head, neither anywhere near the strike zone. This is an example of the speed-accuracy trade off: if I were to pitch the ball faster, I would have to sacrifice accuracy in order to increase the speed. By slowing down the pitches that I was throwing, I could hit the strike zone easier. While it was hard for younger me to understand this, it was better for me to slow down and pitch something that the batter had a chance to hit rather than pitch as fast as I could and have the ball go soaring in the wrong direction like Ice Cube in the GIF below.

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Can't I Just Play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star Again?

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Can't I Just Play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star Again?

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Much like choir, my parents also signed me up for piano lessons when I was 10. I had already participated in choir for several years and I had already started and quit playing the violin when I began piano lessons in the 5th grade, so I already knew how to read music and I had a basis for how playing an instrument worked. This should be easy-peasy lemon squeezy! Well, it was for the first few melodies and songs I learned to play. Scales? Mastered. Arpeggios? Yep. Chopsticks? Perfected. However, after the initial stage of learning the basics of playing the piano, I was not so confident in my abilities anymore. Why? I started learning songs that involved using both hands doing similar yet different things at the same time. That was not a skill I needed with choir or the violin. Turns out, I have terrible bimanual coordination, specifically asymmetric coordination where the two hands are performing two different tasks. Every time I tried to play both hands at the same time, even if I practiced one hand by itself first, I would either disregard one melody and start to play the same thing on both hands or I would just stop playing with one hand altogether and just focus on one hand, both examples of spatial biasing. If the song required me to play one melody using both hands, I would be a world class pianist by now. But that's not how a majority of the songs out there work. No matter how easy or hard the song was, I had to practice for hours in order to be able to play both hands together at the same time with the correct tempo and melody with both hands. And no middle schooler wants to sit at an out of tune piano for hours and hours playing the same song over and over again when they could be hanging out with friends. So I retired from playing the piano after successfully learning the entirety of Für Elise.

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After both of my older siblings had an interest in musical and theater performance over athletic performance, my parents automatically assumed the same would be true for me, so they signed me up for every type of musical endeavor they could, including choir. I joined the Madison Youth Choirs at the ripe age of 7, and this is where I started on my journey of creative activities. In 2016, I was given the opportunity to travel with my choir to Aberdeen, Scotland to participate in the Aberdeen International Youth Festival, which featured various musical and theatre groups from countries all over the world including Italy, Ghana, China, and the Czech Republic. In order to be prepared for the festival, we had to prepare a repertoire of songs to perform for the concerts we would be performing in. One of the songs that we learned was "Bring Me Little Water, Silvy" originally by Sweet Honey in the Rock. The version we learned was arranged by Moira Smiley, who added a body percussion part that included claps and stomps to keep tempo. When we first learned the song and the percussion, it was impossible to perform both at the same time. So, in order for us to properly learn both the singing portion and the percussion portion of the song, our director split them up, and we learned them in parts instead of together, a technique called fractionization. By learning each part separately, we were able to focus on and perfect the techniques of both the song and the percussion. After perfecting both parts separate, it was time to put the two together. At first, we needed to slow down the tempo quite a bit in order to match both parts up correctly, a technique called simplification, but we were able to correlate both parts and perform the entire song faster than if we had started learning both parts at the same time from the beginning.  After more and more practice with both parts together, we were able to increase the tempo of the song back up to where it was supposed to be.

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Bring Me Little Water, Silvy - Moira Smiley

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Great Moments are Born From Great Opportunity

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Great Moments are Born From Great Opportunity

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One activity that I never participated in but wish that I had participated in is ice hockey. I grew up watching hockey games with my older siblings starting at a young age, but I never learned how to skate, which is a pretty important skill to have when playing ice hockey. Although I grew up around the sport, I wasn't extremely interested in it until high school when I started watching NHL hockey, specifically my favorite team, the Minnesota Wild. By that point, there was no way that I would become an elite hockey player. But one likes to dream. So when I watched a game at any level, I would imagine myself playing along with them, stickhandling down the ice, and making the perfect pass to set up my teammate for a goal. Watching others and imagining myself doing the same moves through mental practice helped me to understand the skills and techniques needed to perform certain moves such as stickhandling. I used mostly internal imagery, seeing myself perform the moves from my own point of view, when I thought of doing individual skills, and I used external imagery, seeing myself from another person's perspective, when I imagined myself doing skills with teammates. By imagining myself performing the skills, I created strategies and techniques for myself for if I were to ever try the skills in real life.
Luckily, when it was time to play floor hockey in high school gym class, I was prepared to show off the skills that I had imagined myself perform every time I watched a hockey game, which turned out to be pretty frequently. As soon as I had the puck on my stick, I was able to stickhandle and move the puck in ways that I had never been able to do before. My classmates were impressed with how I was able to move around defenders with ease and set up my teammates for goals, all while keeping the puck on my stick. I was able to thank the mental practice I had been doing for months for the success and growth I had shown in class that day. Maybe someday I'll be as successful as Claude Giroux in the GIF below.

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No, I'm Not a Doctor or a Personal Trainer

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No, I'm Not a Doctor or a Personal Trainer

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This semester is my first semester in the athletic training program, and I've been working with the men's and women's hockey teams since September. Since it's my first semester in the program, I'm learning the basics of athletic training techniques including evaluation skills, specifically special tests for the entire body. It's a lot of information to take in over 15 weeks, and these are skills that I'll need to use continuously over the course of my career. So it is important that I know how to perform the tests correctly, or else I could end up misdiagnosing someone. Luckily, along with my professors and TAs that are teaching me these skills, I have two wonderful preceptors that I'm working with at hockey to help guide me and make sure that I am confident and correct in my skills. When performing a special test, not only am I using task intrinsic feedback, which is naturally available to me as I'm performing the test, such as feeling for a certain bony landmark or a firm endfeel of a ligament, I'm also using augmented feedback, which is given to me both from my preceptors and the athletes that I'm working with. The augmented feedback given to me focuses on both correct performance and any errors that I'm making. By having my preceptors and athletes give me feedback on what I'm doing correct and how I can improve helps me to better understand the task intrinsic feedback I get when I perform a special test. It helps me to know what I should be seeing or what I should be feeling when I perform the skill.