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.