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My main focus for freshman year soccer was: get the varsity coach to notice you so you can make it onto that team next year. I would go to all of the pre-season morning trainings, I joined the Strength and Conditioning program like they suggested, etc. However, there was one "activity" I guess you could say, that I was a little hesitant about. Futsal. Futsal is basically a mini game of soccer, played with a smaller ball on an indoor surface, such as hardwood floors, with smaller boundaries. They had a sign up for a futsal tournament before the season started, which would be a really good way for the coaches to see what you can do. I had never played futsal before. I had played indoor soccer on turf, but futsal is quite a bit different than that. Hesitantly, I signed up to play in this tournament because at the very least it was going to be good practice! I had been playing soccer for many, many years before this but I was nervous that my touches were not going to showcase my skills that I knew I had. Well, when I was put into the game during the tournament, I realized that I was fretting for pretty much no reason! It took a little time to get used to the surface and how quickly the ball rolled on it, but I was still able to control the ball well and pass just like I could on any other surface. I realized that my soccer skills from regular-field conditions: surface, size of soccer ball, size of field, were all able to be transferred to the skills needed for the differing conditions of Futsal. Transfer is when there is a gain or loss in proficiency of one skill as a result of practice in a different skill. My skills that I had been practicing for years from soccer were able to positively transfer to the game of Futsal and allowed me to be successful, without having any practice under those conditions.

Here is gif of my reaction when I found out that the skills from practicing soccer positively transferred over to the game of futsal and I actually played really well for the tournament because of the transfer of those skills.

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Throughout my soccer years, juggling was one of my strong-suits for sure. I could juggle a soccer ball with my knees, feet, and even head. It was very common for coaches to begin practice with 5 minutes of juggling or even to incorporate a drill where there was a juggling competition. I practiced juggling a lot, so whenever we had these activities I was, on average, able to juggle for the longest time. Our coaches a lot of the time would push for us to practice juggling outside of our weekly practices because it helps with your control of the ball and helps to get a lot of small touches in too. So, a lot of the times before practice began, I would get there early and start juggling. A lot of my other teammates began to do so too, but for some reason they just could not get the rhythm down. They would ask me how I was able to control the ball so well and to help them learn how to juggle, but when they asked me, it was so hard to verbalize. I would end up kicking up the soccer ball and just showing them how I go about the process, rather than describing it with words. Juggling was just something that I knew "how to do" and could perform through action, but not really through a description. I would try really hard to describe how the foot should be placed, how the ankle should be locked, etc., but by the end of the explanation, I would be juggling myself to show them. This is a great example of procedural knowledge, which is essentially the "know how" of a series of operations, but is often difficult to verbalize. I knew how to juggle and could explain by doing it myself, but struggled with explaining the ins and outs of it through words.

This gif represents how I just know "how to" juggle and how it has become automatic for me, through procedural knowledge.

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My junior year of high school I decided to help my coach out with a summer-soccer camp for middle schoolers. At the beginning of each day, we would have the kids warm-up with some running and stretching, and then go into some passing drills/patterns. When describing how to perform these drills, like any other sport,  I would take a few of the players and have them demonstrate what the drill entailed for the rest of the kids to see. When watching these demonstrations, the players were problem-solving and strategizing for how much pace they should put on the pass, how they should adjust their bodies, how they should be communicating with their teammates, etc. (Cognitive) Some of these passing drills had a lot of complexity to them and would have to be done a few times around for the kids to get the hang of it. Once they were able to get into a rhythm, it was then about how to make the pass crisper or anything that they could do to make their passing more efficient for the rest of the players and drill in general. (Associative) These same patterns would be done every day and after the first day of camp they were expected to know how to complete them for the rest of the week. In high school you had to know which patterns you were going to do for warmups and which order they should be done in, so we were just getting them ready for high school soccer intensity levels! By the end of the week, these patterns became like second nature to these kids, as they would pass the ball around in the specific patterns without any thought put into it! (Autonomous) It was really interesting to see all of these kids work through Fitts and Posner's 3 Stages of Learning: cognitive, associative, autonomous, for such complex drills/patterns. I was never able to analyze each stage of the learning process that I saw while I was working the camp, but after learning about this topic in class, it all makes sense!

Below is a gif of how I picture the kids in the soccer camp were feeling as they went through the 3 stages of learning and were finally able automatically pass the ball around in the correct patterns.

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When reminiscing back on the old soccer glory days, there will always be one thing I will never forget: sprints. My high school soccer coach was firm believer in running sprints for any occasion that he thought was necessary. Forgot to bring your pinny to practice? Sprints. Messed up a drill one too many times? Sprints. Forgot one of the practice balls on the field? Sprints. Oh, we definitely learned quickly what to do and what not to do. And to make matters even worse, it wasn't just about the action of running itself, but also the fact that EVERY teammate had to touch the target line and if they didn't? Well, we would have to restart the entire sprint. Some of my teammates were fast and just wanted to get these sprints done with, so they would just run as fast and they could and would turn to sprint back just as fast. However, by doing this, a lot of the times they would miss the line because they were just going so fast! They were sacrificing their accuracy for their speed, which in turn also sacrificed our chance to be done with the sprint after one time! Fitts' Law's speed-accuracy tradeoff essentially explains that as speed is increased for a motor task, accuracy decreases and vice versa. In this case, my teammates would be running so fast that they wouldn't be able to accurately put down their foot on the line, which shows how these 2 components tradeoff. This law explains why I had to run so many sprints during my high school soccer career!

Below is a representation of me trying to run after we had to restart the sprints over for the 4th time because people were not touching the line because they were running too fast.

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The summer before 6th grade, I had moved from a suburb outside of Chicago to a suburb outside of Milwaukee. This meant everything new for me: new friends, new school, and new soccer team. On my old soccer team, I was always the person who would take any free-kicks: penalty kicks, corner kicks, even most of the goal kicks since I was a defender at the time. However, when I got to my new team, they already had someone who was their "free-kick specialist". At first I wasn't worried, they just hadn't seen enough of my skills yet, right? Well, unfortunately that didn't seem to change much at all over the 2 years I was with that specific team. I would spend hours outside of practice, schedule private practices with other coaches I knew to work on my technique, basically anything that would help me improve my skillset for free kicks. However, as much time and effort as I put into practicing these free kicks, I just was never able to kick the ball as far or as hard or as accurately, as the other girl on my team. It was SO frustrating! I would go home and rant to my parents about how my teammate was just always taking better free-kicks than me. I was always wondering why, even though I practice so much more than her, she was always somehow just a little bit better than me at these kicks. Well folks, this is where individual differences come into play. Individual differences account for the fact that someone who has the same amount of practice as you or maybe even less, can still be more successful. This is due to the abilities that a person has, which are innate. Some people are just born with a greater potential for success. So, yep, now I see why my hard work wasn't paying off.

Below represents a picture of me when I was putting in a lot of extra practice and my thought process during that time. I didn't realize that some people just actually are better at certain things than others because abilities are innate. INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES!