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When I was a toddler, my parents noticed that any time a song could come on whether that be in a movie, on the radio, or in the car, I would feel the need to dance. To facilitate my love for dance I was gifted ballet outfits and dance videos. By the time I was three, I was old enough to enroll in the local dance studio in my small town. At the time, the only class that was offered to that age level was tap. But as I got older and my passion for dance grew, I had an interest in taking as many classes as possible. At my studio, the whole year would be dedicated to learning dances to perform in the annual recital. By the time I was in 9th grade, I was taking jazz, tap, contemporary, hip-hop, and ballet classes. I realized that needing to memorize five different choreographies on top of memorizing information for school, as well as participating in other extracurricular activities became a challenge. It felt like there was so much information in my brain that I couldn’t apply my full potential of knowledge to all aspects of my activities. It particularly made it stressful to memorize all of those dances and perform them technically and adequately. This led to issues in my short-term memory which is the capacity to hold a small amount of information in the mind for a short period of time. Therefore, I went through stints where I didn’t know the choreography well enough to perform on my own without assistance due to the failure to consolidate the information into long-term memory. It wasn’t until I took the time to process the choreography; encode, store, and retrieve it, leading to a great performance.

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When I was in the 11th grade, I decided to join the tennis team. I had never played tennis before besides the short unit we had once a year in gym class. I knew I wasn’t very good, but from what I heard from my friends that were on the team, tennis was a laid-back sport and you didn’t need to be experienced to join. Therefore, the summer before the season started, I decided to go to the courts to practice, so it seemed like I had some knowledge of the sport. I would go with my friend who was experienced to have her act as a coach and someone to hit the ball back and forth with. I had played volleyball for six years prior and my friend told me that serving in tennis was similar to serving in volleyball regarding the ball being thrown into the air and the arm following through to serve overhand. Serving was my strength in volleyball therefore, I was confident I could use that skill set in tennis. I believe that a positive transfer occurred which is the beneficial effect of previous experience on learning a new skill. This is due to the Identical Elements Theory (Thorndike) which states that the similarity of skill and context creates easier contextual components. Since I had experience and muscle memory to hit a volleyball over the net in a proper way, I was able to translate that to the game of tennis and serve the ball successfully over the net.

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I played basketball from the time I was in the 5th grade until I was a senior in high school. I played for the school I was attending, the recreation club in my city, and played traveling club ball during the summer. Therefore, throughout all of those years playing basketball I suffered through a lot of practices multiple times a week. Even though I had a lot of different coaches, all of them seemed to have a similar approach to how they organized their practices. All of them utilized practice variability which is the variability of movement and context characteristics a person experiences while practicing a skill. However, it was important that they accounted for the contextual interference effect which is memory and performance disruptions that result from practicing skills or variations of skills within the context of practice. The goal of the practice was to learn skills and be able to retain and transfer given skills into a game-like setting. There are two extremes of practice schedules that can be used. The first is blocked practice where all trials of a given task are completed before moving on to the next task and random practice is where trials for a given task are mixed with other tasks in random order. All of my coaches used the random practice setup, which mixed different skills and elements in random orders throughout our 2 hour time periods. For example, maybe one day we would practice dribbling, then move onto free throws, then practice layups, then defense, then free throws, then back to shooting, and then scrimmage, etc. The next day those skills would repeat in a whole new different order.  Therefore, there was always a mix of skills needed to perform the tasks effectively. This model leads to more errors in the learning stage or practice, however, leads to better retention rates. (Hall, 1994) This is beneficial in the game of basketball because, in practice, you are free to make mistakes, however, in a stressful game setting, it’s important to have the retention skill set to be successful.

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Out of all the sports I played throughout my life, track and field was the sport in which I invested the most time and effort in becoming successful. My trademark events were the shot and discus. I didn’t become serious about my dedication to the sport until the 10th grade. That was the year when I purchased my own equipment so I could go out and practice throwing on the weekend when I didn’t have practice. I also joined a throwing club through UW-Madison to gain more training experience from knowledgeable coaches that could give me valuable feedback to improve my form. I saw a huge improvement in the length I could throw the shot and discus that year. I ended up winning back-to-back conference championships in the discus my sophomore and junior year and was on track to go to state my senior year before Covid canceled the whole season. I remember there were times when I wouldn’t perform my best due to the pressure of the situation and the stress of doing well enough to place. However, in those circumstances, I remember my coach would always say to mentally picture how I should feel when I released the shot or the disc. He was implying the idea of mental practice which is the active cognitive rehearsal of physical skill in the absence of overt physical movements. By participating in mental practice, I was able to refocus myself on performing the skill to execute my immediate performance. The imagery I found the most useful was internal imagery where I would imagine what my body would feel like when I correctly throw the equipment and the sensations I should be experiencing. Therefore when it came to my time in the ring, I felt like I could execute my movements with ease without having to think about how to properly move my body. This is an example of improving a skill that involves power which Van Gyn studied in 1990 to improve a 40-m bicycle sprint.