ABSTRACT
Because the statistics of most sports were designed primarily to assess or document physical and technical proficiency, they are of limited use for the analysis of psychological performance. Batting average, field-goal percentage, greens in regulation, first-serve percentage, and a plethora of other global indices of performance are interpreted more in terms of their relationship to the physical and technical abilities that directly influence these measures of proficiency. A baseball player who hits .200 or a basketball player who shoots 35% from the free-throw line is likely to be analyzed first from a technical or physical, and not necessarily a psychological perspective. Although one can infer psychological performance on the basis of global statistics of a sport, the fact that associations between psychological factors and sport-specific outcome variables have been weak indicates that new measures must be developed to better isolate relationships that may exist between psychological factors and outcome measures (microlevel statistics).
