Hockey research scores

By Don McSwiney

It happens every night in professional hockey, usually followed by the disbelieving cry of: “How did he save that?”

Researchers at the University of Calgary’s Faculty of Kinesiology may have found the secret to dazzling goaltending, after they discovered the exact spot a goalie needs to watch to be successful.

Graduate student Derek Panchuk, BKin’01, MSc’05, and Dr. Joan Vickers, a kinesiology professor, discovered what they have called the “quiet eye” phenomenon. The pair has just completed the most comprehensive, on-ice hockey study to determine where elite goalies focus their eyes in order to make a save.

Simply put, they found that goalies should keep their eyes on the puck. In an article to be published in the journal Human Movement Science, Panchuk and Vickers discovered that the best goaltenders rest their gaze directly on the puck and the shooter’s stick, almost a full second before the shot is released. When they do that, they make the save more than 75 percent of the time.

“Looking at the puck seems fairly obvious,” Panchuk says, “until you look at the eye movements of novice goaltenders, who scatter their gaze all over the place and have a much lower save percentage than the elite goalies.”

The findings also contradict research out of Europe which suggests that soccer goalies concentrate on the non-shooting foot of the kicker to make the save.

The quiet eye has been Vickers’ life work. She discovered it first in golf (where she has worked with the PGA) and continued her research in several other sports. Vickers describes the quiet eye as a critical moment that occurs in every sport—the moment where the eyes must receive and the brain must process the last piece of visual information before you perform the final critical movement such as putting, shooting a basket, serving, or in this case, making a save.

To accurately track eye movements and gaze duration in a sport, Vickers’ neuromuscular lab continues to pioneer both technology and research. Their latest invention is wireless headgear that has cameras recording the movements of the athletes’ eyes, as well as what they’re looking at. The Vision in Action system allows researchers to precisely record an athlete’s eye movements, body movements and objects (such as a puck) to within 16.67 milliseconds.

“Our previous experience tells us that if athletes incorporate what we’ve learned in quiet eye studies, they can improve in their sport—even if they are already at an elite level,” Vickers said.

Panchuk plans to continue the study by moving from wrist shots to slap-shots and penalty shots.