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It is important for basketball players to be able to play with both hands, whether its dribbling or shooting. I had played basketball since I was little, so I know this first hand (no pun intended). When learning how to play, many coaches have you dribble with your right hand first and refine this skill and then switch the drill to your other hand. Being left handed, this meant that I learned how to do everything with my non-preferred hand, first. This worked out well for me because, as studies show, bilateral transfer works better when going from non-preferred to preferred hand when it comes to spatial accuracy. So, my shooting, passing, and lets even stretch it to dribbling, was better bilaterally than most of the kids on my team since we focused on the right side and these skills transferred to my left side with ease being I had better motor control of the left side of my body in the first place.  This video shows the player using both hands to perform the skill of dribbling. This would be the end result of continuous practice and bilateral transfer

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As a rightside with poor defensive skills, I was never one to serve in a game. At least that’s what I tell myself as to why I don’t serve. In my early stages of learning how to play volleyball I was never good at serving… I was awful. There was plenty of inherent feedback of the ball never making it over the net, so I knew I was doing something wrong, I just didn’t know what. I never contacted the ball right and it just felt weird. Did I know how to fix it? No. It wasn’t until one open gym when a coach really saw me struggling that I got the help I needed… Augmented feedback. While I knew I was doing something wrong thanks to the plethora of inherent feedback, I needed augmented feedback to enhance skill acquisition. After a few missed serves, the coach told me to fix one thing at a time. After I had corrected this one thing, we would move onto the next thing that needed to be fixed (we were there for a long time). It was very smart of him to let me get a few serves in after giving me feedback because it is more effective to not give feedback after every trial. But eventually, I made a few serves over and became more confident with serving in general. Though I still don’t serve in games (I’m convinced its because of my position), but I can successfully serve over the net all thanks to a little augmented feedback.

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With volleyball, I started late. Everyone started in elementary school and here I was just learning how to rotate on the court in middle school. So, to speed things up, I went to A LOT of skills camps. Besides the passing, the setting, and the serving, I wanted to hit. But I needed to ditch the “shuffle, shuffle, swing” idea of an approach and learn the steps. Because I am left handed, the sequence was “right, left, right” but was taught more like “right…leftright”. As the stages of learning goes, there were some distinct processes that I went through when learning this very valuable skill. First the cognitive stage. At the beginning, I really had the think about the steps and even would say them out loud as if to tell my legs whose turn it was to step. It took many trials of “left, right lefts” or “right, right left” or even resort back to the “shuffle, shuffle, swing” but once I got the steps down, they stuck. That didn’t mean I was doing well with the swings though. Now that I had the steps down, I had to focus on where I was going and how fast. This all depended on the speed and placement of the ball and where I was on the court. This was the associative stage; using environmental cues (the ball), the detection of errors and making small adjustments to timing all encompassed the motor patterns needed for my approach. At this point in my volleyball career, I don’t even think about “right, left, right” anymore when I take an approach, its just a natural process. I still can adjust for timing errors, but I am able to think about other things instead of my approach (how many blockers, where I should hit the ball, if I should tip it or hit the ball etc.). These characteristics are ones we would find in the autonomous stage where the skill has become largely automatic. I am on the Club Volleyball team here at UW and we went undefeated this semester, so you can say I have caught up since middle school.

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I am almost 100% positive that anyone in class who went to a public elementary school in Wisconsin had the pleasure of being forced to learn how to play the recorder. While we learned the important skill of reading music, it instilled a fear and hatred of solo performance. Fast-forward to middle school when we had to choose band or orchestra; I chose band and of course the most difficult instrument to learn to play- the oboe. I practiced a lot on my own but realized that I went slower than when we practiced as a band. This was an issue because when I had practiced on my own, I would work until I could play specific sections of the piece without mistakes. Then, in band class, when the conductor sped up the tempo of play, I would make mistake after mistake. This follows perfectly with Fitt’s Law: Speed-Accuracy trade-off; the faster you perform a task, the more mistakes you make. If you don’t know what an oboe sounds like, it pretty much sounds like a duck. So, you can understand the horror of being one of the loudest, weirdest sounding instruments making a bunch of mistakes. After these embarrassing rehearsals, I realized I had to practice at rehearsal speed or faster to be comfortable with playing Lora Lee (my oboe) with my fellow woodwinds. (Knowing this made me practice the saxophone and piano the same way later).

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Every day for all four years of high school track, we would start practice by going down into the basement to the wrestling room for Mental Imagery. For me this meant nap time, but for many people on the team this was a time to get in the zone. As we would lay on the mats, our coach would talk to us, saying things about practice and then about race day, telling us to picture ourselves doing the best we had ever done, making us think about how this would feel, especially at the finish of our race. Now learning about it in class, I should’ve have taken this opportunity to participate. When telling us to picture our best (looking at ourselves from outside our body), he had us using external imagery. He then also had us use internal imagery by asking us to imagine how it felt when we performed our best. In this case, mental practice was done to aid in performing a well-learned skill rather than improve the acquisition of one. Our coach believed in all the hypotheses and was convinced of the neuromuscular explanation where neuromotor pathways were being activated without activating the muscle. This was his main reason for doing this every day, but I was just happy to get a nap. (This is a picture of my last race in high school where everyone in my relay race got together and used internal imagery of each of us finishing our leg of the race.