Coordinated gaze behaviour of handball referees: a practical exploration with focus on the methodical implementation

Abstract

Though the interaction of team members in sport has already been considered when analysing team expertise and performance, there is no comparable research addressing the interplay of referee teams as part of their expertise. Based on lab-based research on coordinated gaze behaviour, we assumed that orchestrating referees’ gaze is an important way of improving referee performances. To first scrutinize if handball referees coordinate their gaze, the gaze fixations of a handball referee team was analysed while they were presiding over a game. Results showed that referees mostly fixated the same aspects of game action (75%) and behaved differently as stated in existing guidelines for refereeing in handball. That is, the current results indicate that handball referees’ coordination of gaze behaviour seems far from optimal (they focused on the same aspects of game action too often) and should be considered when thinking about avenues to performance improvement. Furthermore, we tried to discuss potentials and limitations of the current research approach for future studies that seem necessary to gain more insight into the expertise interplay of referees.

Gaze Behavior of Referees in Sport—A Review

“…In addition, at a higher angle more errors were made at a short distance, whereas at a smaller angle more errors were made at a long distance. It is possible that when the distance is short and the viewing angle is large, more saccades of larger amplitudes occur when attempting to see both the passing and the receiving players, and it is easier to fixate on In doubtful situations-tendency of both groups to keep the flag down More correct decisions when offside line was fixated at the time of the pass and when this fixation was longer Fasold et al, 2018 Team handball A case study of a team of two referees with 6 years of experience at the regional level…”

“…A flow diagram of the study selection process based on the PRISMA Statement (Liberati et al, 2009 ) is presented in Figure 1 . The electronic search yielded 11 relevant studies and the manual search yielded one more study, for a total of 12 studies (Bard et al, 1980 ; Catteeuw et al, 2009 , 2010b ; Hancock and Ste-Marie, 2013 ; Millslagle et al, 2013 ; Flessas et al, 2015 ; Luis et al, 2015 ; Spitz et al, 2016 ; Schnyder et al, 2017 ; Fasold et al, 2018 ; Pizzera et al, 2018 ; Moore et al, 2019 ).…”

“…In our search, we found one case study that examined gaze behavior of two team-handball referees during a training game (Fasold et al, 2018 ). Among the 12 studies discussed in our review, this study is the only one that attempted to examine shared gaze behavior of the referees.…”

Eye tracking in high-performance sports: Evaluation of its application in expert athletes

“…Another important aspect, which needs to be considered in research on visual gaze strategies, especially in (high-class) team sports, is team communication. Different team members possibly apply different gaze strategies and swap ideas on the perceived information verbally (Araújo & Davids, 2016;Fasold, Noël, Wolf, & Hüttermann, 2018). For example, the setter in beach volleyball shouts information on the positioning of the opponent players to his partner, while she/he fixes the ball trajectory before her/his attacking stroke (Künzell, Schweikart, Köhn, & Schläppi-Lienhard, 2014).…”

New directions in the study of expertise in sport and exercise science

“…Finally, Fasold, Noël, Wolf, & Hüttermann (2019), also provide a novel empirical contribution, considering the analysis of expertise and performance, in the interplay of sports officials (referees) as part of their collective performance as a team. The authors presented case-study data from two elite handball referees to assess how these officials coordinated their gaze during the decision-making process.…”