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I began playing basketball when I was 7 years old.  I have always been a very competitive person, and found basketball to be a great way to channel that drive.  I played basketball with the same group of girls my whole life all throughout grade school, middle school, and high school.  The interesting thing about playing team sports is the different personalities that come together on the team.  There were girls who were timid and quiet and those who were quite aggressive, girls who were tall and those who were short, and they all performed at different levels.  When I was younger, I did not realize how important these differences between people were, but now, through exploring topics in Kines 361 I have come to understand how these differences lent themselves to the performances of each player.

Individual differences are things that cannot be manipulated or changed about a person that contribute to their performance in skills.  Some types of individual differences can be body configuration, emotional or personal characteristics, and motor abilities.  I grew up with two older brothers and as a result, I was very tough and not afraid to be aggressive.  This contributed immensely to my performance in basketball because I could steal the ball from others, and made sure that they wouldn’t steal it from me.  However, many of the other girls on my team were not like me.  They were timid and didn’t like to get too rough.  This made games that required steals or boxing out during practice fun for me, because it was really easy to win.  My sophomore year a new girl joined our team who ended up having a very similar personality to mine.  She was competitive and aggressive as well when it came to basketball, so suddenly I had real competition in practice.  Our coach recognized this and would frequently pit us against each other so that we both were receiving an equal challenge.  As annoyed as I was by this, I understand that this helped me grow as a player by humbling me and making me work harder.  I also have realized through my new understanding of the topic of individual differences how helpful some characteristics can be if you are teamed up with people who are similar in those ways, like I was.

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I am short and muscular, making me the perfect build for a sprinter, which is luckily something I love to do.  I began running track in middle school, excited for a new sport that was so different from anything I’ve done before.  In our first few practices, our coach made us try all different types of events, so that we could find our niche.  I tried it all, but found that my best events were sprints, so that’s where I focused my training.  In sprints, every second counts, so you find strategies to cut time.  The biggest and easiest way to cut time is the start of the race.  The start is tricky because you need to react quickly to the start gun, and not false start before it goes off.  It’s all about reaction time.

Reaction time is the time after a stimulus is presented and a movement is produced.  It is made up of stimulus identification, response selection, and response programming stages.  In a sprint start, these stages would be identifying that it was the gun, choosing to respond with leaving the start blocks, and preparing and initiating that response.  In track, this reaction time is improved by only having one response, which is to run so less internal processing is involved, taking up time.  Because there is only one response and runners are prepared to start, false starts frequently happen.  As hard as it is to admit, I have had my fair share of false starts.  What would happen to me was that someone next to me would flinch or sway forward, and my brain would tell interpret this stimulus as the beginning of the race, and the only response I had present in my head at the time was to leave the blocks and start running.  However, I learned from experience and my mistakes that I could only have one stimulus-response pair, which would be the gun and a start, or this would continue happening.  Luckily, this was effective and lead to success in my events, because, as my coach always said “Your start will make or break your race. Make it a good one!”

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In elementary school, they introduce you to all different kinds of sports in gym class, and teach you the different skills required of that sport.  So when I was in elementary school, they taught me how to serve, pass, set, and spike a volleyball, using verbal instructions, paired with visual examples, to help with consolidation.  Through these strategies I was able to pick up on how to perform these skills, and able to continue practicing in order to improve on them.  I continued playing volleyball from then until high school, and was quite good at all of these skills from years of practice.

About the time I was in high school, my younger sister became interested in the sport, and wanted to learn how to play too.  Being the great big sister I am, I agreed to help her out.  However, problems arose when I could only describe things to her as “you just do this and this and this,” as I did the skill we were working on.  I had become so used to the steps of performing these skills that it was procedural knowledge for me and I couldn’t accurately describe it to her, which became frustrating to her because the way I was teaching her made no sense.  After struggling through this for a while, I thought back to elementary school when I learned these skills and the ways that my gym teacher had taught them to me, explaining what I was doing while I was doing it and using imagery like making a diamond with your hands while setting, tapping into my declarative memory.  To my delight and my sister’s, this worked so much better, and she caught on very quickly.  My sister ended up loving volleyball, and has been playing ever since in school, clubs, and camps.  She has become an expert at it through her immense amounts of practice, and I would say she is much better than me now.  If asked to perform these skills now, she would probably be just like me all those years ago, and would have no problem showing you, but would struggle to verbalize what she was doing.  And so the student becomes the teacher.

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Cross country sounds like a super easy sport.  I’ve had friends tell me that cross country isn’t really a sport because there’s no strategies or plays, just running a course.  They could not be more wrong.  Cross country requires a whole host of strategies, such as when to speed up or slow down, when to pass other runners, how to breathe, etc.  One of the most important strategies for me was where to look while running.  Visual systems played a key role in races, both ambient and dorsal.

There was one course in particular that we ran every year that was quite complex.  The course had very small trails through thick woods and lots of turns to make.  For most of the race, I would watch the ground and a few feet ahead of me for roots, rocks, potholes, and other runners, that might trip me up.  While doing this, I was using my ambient visual system, to identify where things were in order to avoid them, hence why this system is also called vision for action.  In this course, there were also several intersections that you had to go the correct way at.  At these spots in the race, there were arrows pointing the correct direction, so I would have to use my focal systems to identify what the arrow was, right or left facing, hence why this system is called vision for perception.  Without proper use of these two visual systems, I would have tripped over a rock or took a wrong turn, and never finished the race, so thank goodness for the visual cortex.

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I had played a variety of sports my entire life, and luckily never been seriously injured, just a couple of bumps and bruises along the way.  However, this all changed my sophomore year of high school, when on a fast break in basketball, I collided with two defenders and tore my ACL.  I had never been in so much pain, and couldn’t walk without crutches for at least a week.  During this time, I was diagnosed and scheduled for surgery a few weeks later.  Following my knee surgery, I was on crutches again for over a month, and in a knee brace for three.  This meant that I did not use my leg for walking for an extensive period of time, and even my good leg did not experience walking in the same way that I have walked my whole life.  Obviously walking is something that we do so often, it becomes second nature and requires little thought, but when you don’t use this for long periods of time, you start to lose it.  This is what happened for me.

By the time I got off crutches, walking was incredibly difficult for me.  I had been working on strengthening the muscles in my leg during physical therapy and was confident that I would be able to walk just fine once I got rid of my crutches.  This was unfortunately not the case.  When you learn and continually practice a task, you get really good at it, and then when you take a break from it, the retention experienced upon trying it again almost always shows a decrease in performance.  I had taken a long break from walking, and my retention showed it.  Luckily, physical therapists are used to this, and ready to help you learn how to walk again, making sure all the mechanics of walking are correct, the muscles are ready, and that you get lots of practice.  Through all of this practice and correcting, I was able to bring my performance back up to what it was before, and able to walk normally without thinking about my foot placement or my knee drive.  It became second nature again and I was able to walk unassisted without a problem.