Investigation of the relationships between attention concentration, balance and shooting performance in young male basketball players

This research examines the effects of attention, concentration and static balance variables on shooting performance of young male basketball players. The study group consists of athletes who compete in the local leagues of the Turkish Basketball Federation (TBF), have at least seven years of active sports experience and train regularly at least three days a week. The mean age of the n=41 male athletes participating in the study was found to be 16.12 ±0.84 years, their mean height was 186.98 ±8.32 cm, and their body weight was 78.17 ±12.28 kg, and their participation was voluntary. The data collection tools used in the research were Burdon Attention Task for selective attention level, Letter Cancellation Task for concentration level, Flamingo Balance Test (FBT) for measuring static balance and AAHPERD Shooting Test for shooting performance. In addition, height and body weight measurements of the athletes were taken. SPSS 26.0 package program was used in the analysis of the data, statistical outliers were checked with the Z-score method and it was determined that all observations were within reasonable limits (|z|≤3). Therefore, the analysis was performed without removing any data. The normality distribution of the data was evaluated with the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, and Pearson Correlation Analysis was applied to determine the relationships between the variables. The statistical significance level was accepted as p<0.05. The study findings showed that there was a significant and negative relationship between static balance and shooting performance (r=-0.46, p<0.001). This result reveals that athletes with better balance exhibit higher shooting performance. A positive and significant relationship was found between concentration level and shooting performance (r=0.39, p=0.001) and it was observed that shooting performance increased as concentration increased. Similarly, a positive but weak relationship was found between attention and shooting performance (r=0.12, p=0.312) and this relationship was determined to be statistically insignificant. On the other hand, a negative but statistically insignificant relationship was found between height and shooting performance (r=-0.22, p=0.071). In conclusion, this study shows that static balance and concentration are determinants of shooting performance in basketball players. On the other hand, the effect of attention level and height on shooting performance was found to be statistically insignificant.