Influence of skill level on predicting the success of one's own basketball free throws

Basketball players sometimes claim to know when their shot is good, even before it goes in. This is likely because shooter proprioception can help determine shot outcome, even before their eyes confirm it. This phenomenon, however, has not been systematically explored for collegiate and recreational shooters. This study compared how well collegiate shooters and recreational shooters could predict outcomes of their own free throws without seeing the shot result. Forty collegiate and recreational shooters shot standard free throws while wearing liquid-crystal occlusion glasses that activated to occlude vision immediately following ball release during each shot. After each shot, shooters verbally predicted shot outcome as “in” or “out”, and predicted results were compared with actual outcomes. As anticipated, for made shots, collegiate shooters more accurately predicted their own shots than recreational shooters. However, unexpectedly, for missed shots, collegiate shooters were worse than recreational shooters and were even significantly worse than chance. Further analysis found that collegiate shooters exhibited a significantly higher bias toward predicting their shots as “in”. Understanding how shooters of different skill levels perceive their own shot could inform future training strategies for improving shooter accuracy.