Clarkson University Associate Professor of Physical Therapy Ali Boolani recently co-authored a study focused on whether basketball coaches’ perceptions of player performance align with reality.
The study is titled “A hot mess: basketball coaches’ perceptions of ability versus actual performances of their athletes” and investigates whether a coach’s opinions on a player’s ability matched their stats and results from data analytics.
Boolani worked with Timothy Baghurst, professor of education and the director of FSU COACH: Interdisciplinary Center for Athletic Coaching at Florida State University on the research. Baghurst is a coaching expert, and the pair wanted to explore a change they had noticed in recent coaching, where coaches are being forced to rely more heavily on analytics.
“Coaches make many decisions before a competition about who is playing, strategy, and so on. Then, during the event, coaches must make even more immediate decisions that can have significant ramifications on the outcome,” Bagurst said. “But, why do coaches make the decisions they do? Do they use some form of statistics? Is it based on feelings? Are perceptions of players’ abilities reflected in their productivity? This is what we wanted to find out.”
Boolani and Baghurst studied the perceptions of six college basketball coaches who were asked to collectively identify the five most important attributes when evaluating a basketball player. Then, before the season began, all coaches were asked to independently score each of their athletes on these attributes using a 100mm Visual Analog Scale.These scores were compared to player performances during the season.
“What we found is that coaches’ perceptions were terrible and not accurate at all in predicting how a basketball player would perform,” Boolani said. “The moral of the story is that statistics and quantitative analyses are more important at assessing a basketball player’s ability than relying on a coach’s ‘eye-test.’”
While the study found coaches in this particular scenario were off-base in their perceptions, Baghurst recognizes the results may not be the same in every scenario.
“This is a snapshot from one collegiate program, and to suggest that our findings will be the same in other sports, levels, and coaches would be premature,” he said. “We need to determine whether our findings are similar in other situations. For example, does a volunteer, high school, or professional NBA coach have similar misunderstandings about their athletes? We just don’t know yet, but our findings do suggest that coaches need to be careful how they interpret their perceptions of their athletes’ abilities.”
Boolani, meanwhile, intends to focus on another aspect of coach perception.
“I try to find objective ways to measure subjectivity,” he said. “So my next step is to see if we can identify how well coaches can identify how fatigued their players are and compare them to analytics.”
To read the full study, visit https://bit.ly/3zeEw89.