Eye on the Ball

Basically, someone asked me the other day what distinguishes a squash player like myself (roughly 5.5 level) with a pro. The immediate thing that came to mind was footwork - watch a pro move around the court and they look as if they are walking around the court, vs. an amateur who runs like a chicken with the head cut off:



But, it turns out there is one more thing that distinguishes a good player from a pro, and it is reaction time and anticipation via watching the ball:

Anticipation in squash: differences in advance cue utilization between expert and novice players.

• Abernethy B.

Department of Human Movement Studies, University of Queensland, St Lucia, Australia.

The time of occurrence and spatial location of the advance cues used to anticipate the direction and force of an opponent's stroke in squash were examined using a film task. This task, designed to stimulate the normal perceptual display of the defensive player, consisted of two discrete parts, each containing 160 individual stroke sequences (trials). In the first part of the film task, the display was occluded at different time intervals throughout the development of the opponent's stroke and the 16 expert and 20 novice subjects had to predict both the direction (down-wall or cross-court) and force (drive or drop shot) of the opponent's stroke. In the second part of the film task, visibility to selected advance cues was occluded by placing opaque mats on the film surface. Across all of the film task conditions experts were superior to novices in predicting the event outcome from the information available, highlighting the important contribution anticipatory skills make to expert performance in this sport. Analysis of lateral (direction) error showed that the most critical time periods for extracting information about stroke direction are the periods between 160-80 ms prior to racket-ball contact and the period of extended ball flight arising at least 80 ms after contact. Whereas both groups were attuned to this ball flight information, only the experts were capable of picking up information from the early part of the opponent's actions. This early information appeared to be provided by the opposing player's arm action. Similar time periods were found to be also important for the prediction of stroke depth, but in this case both experts and novices were similar in their cue dependence.

PMID: 2359149 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

Basically, that is academic mumbo-jumbo for keep your eye on the ball. Squash has such a sparse following that two world champs, Jon Powers and Jon White came to my sports club and for $125 I got to play with them and watch them play eachother (they decided not to use just last names on the promotional materials in order not to sound like kkk members). Here is a video with Jon White so you can watch him watch the ball and walk around the court. Here are other pro matches if you are interested.