ABSTRACT
The term Situation Awareness (SA) has received scant explicit recognition within the Sports Psychology literature, which is surprising given the task requirements of many sports. The 'awareness' component of sports performance can easily be understood through the commonly used exemplar of SA i.e., the fighter pilot (e.g., Endsley, 1993), even a major difference is that the pilot indirectly perceives many variables through instrumentation whereas the sports player relies on direct perception of the environment. We know that the fighter pilot is required to have considerable spatial knowledge (awareness) of the dynamic, externally-paced, three dimensional environment. This is precisely the type of environment that faces players of invasion games (e.g., soccer, basketball or American football) and racket sports. The fighter pilot has to have spent many hours practicing manipulating the controls of the aeroplane to allow fast and partially implicit control such that the aeroplane and its weapons systems can be engaged with extreme precision and speed. This is also the nature of expertise in the aforementioned sports. The expert soccer player can control and pass the football whilst the squash player can hit the ball with the racket with similar levels of precision and speed as would be expected from an expert performer of any domain where a large number of hours of deliberate, purposeful practice have been undertaken (Ericsson, Krampe and Tesch-Romer, 1993; Ericsson, 1996). Of course higher order cognitive functions are also required of the fighter pilot to enable a temporal mapping of the controlled elements i.e., the plane and its weapons systems, with the external features beyond control (the enemy aircraft and the terrain in which the dogfight takes place). These attentional demands as well as the ability to shift focus as required, the ability to recognize pertinent information from the visual display to allow anticipatory behavior, and rapid decision-making to elicit the best course of action describe the tasks necessary for successful operation of a fighter plane. Once again these requirements directly relate to the tasks undertaken in invasion and racket sports. For example, the soccer player must be able to attend to both the opponent trying to take the ball away and be aware of the team-mate making a run into space so that the ball can be passed at the appropriate time. A racket sports player must monitor the opponent's play to the extent that very small changes in the opponent's racket and arm preparation can be observed, enabling an anticipatory movement toward the intended shot direction and consequently a more accurate return shot
(Abernethy and Russell, 1984, 1987). Thus the expert performer, within many sports, has been defined by the ability to be aware of certain aspects of play and make more appropriate decisions when faced with a number of options usually under severe time constraints (Ward and Williams, 2003). These requirements have been well researched in sports psychology although little reference has been made to SA. This chapter will therefore review the appropriate sports psychology literature to make explicit the link to SA.
