Improving Visual Awareness and Decision Making

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“Why didn’t he look to his left” “Why didn’t we use the short side” How many times as a rugby coach have we thought or heard comments made about our players such as the ones above. The ability of our players to react to what is around them,and to make the correct decision is possibly the hardest thing to coach or instill in them. Firstly,what is it that makes a player with good vision and decision making skills.There are times when we observe players and think how much time they seem to have during a game and their ability to make correct decisions on the run.How do they achieve this? These players have learnt to react quickly to what is happening around them and to carry out hopefully the correct decision for a positive outcome. As for any skill that we use in rugby union,the skills of decision making and vision can be taught and improved within our players. So how do we coach this skill?Before we discuss this we need to understand what visual awareness is and how it relates to decision making. What is Visual Awareness and its relationship to Decision Making? Vision is possibly the most variable and selective of all the human senses.Attempting to observe fast movements in sport,places great demands on human vision.Vision involves many subtle and sophisticated links between the brain,muscles and eyes. The eyes send information to the brain where it is interpreted and integrated as a three dimensional phenomenom.(Knudson and Kluka 1991).This integration is known as “fusion”.The eyes continuously move throughout the visual field until something gets our attention and we will focus both eyes on that object.This is known as “fixation”.Fixations are important because focus ability is limited to about 3 degrees.Because the focus of the visual field is so small,peripheral vision is very important in sport.The information gathered from our peripheral

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