Comparison of hand, foot and eye reaction performances of professional and amateur football goalkeeper in virtual reality environment

The main aim of this study was to evaluate the hand, foot and eye reaction performances of professional and amateur soccer goalkeepers in a virtual reality environment. A total of 36 athletes, including 19 amateurs (mean age 17.95±1.8717 years, mean height 183.84±4.58 cm, mean body weight 75.26±8.50 kg) and 17 professionals (mean age 27.71±6.52 years, mean height 187.06±4.22 cm, mean body weight 82.88±6.31 kg) participated in the study. Within the scope of the study, the results of six different reaction tests were compared. The conformity of the data to normal distribution was analyzed by Shapiro-Wilk test, t-test was applied for the conforming ones and Mann-Whitney U test was applied for the others. In addition, effect size and statistical power values were calculated. The statistical significance level was set as p < 0.05 and the analyses were performed using SPSS-23 software. According to the results of the analysis, in the single color hand reaction test, amateurs were 0.654±0.12 seconds and professionals were 0.664±0.18 seconds (p = 0.819); in the double color hand reaction test, amateurs were 0.777±0.24 seconds and professionals were 0.714±0.13 seconds (p = 0.475); in the single color foot reaction test, amateurs were 0.573±0. 06 seconds for amateurs and 0.598±0.09 seconds for professionals (p = 0.585); 0.719±0.06 seconds for amateurs and 0.711±0.05 seconds for professionals in the two-color foot reaction test (p = 0.590); 0.841±0.22 seconds for amateurs and 1.024±0.33 seconds for professionals in the one-color hand-foot reaction test (p = 0.084). In the two-color hand-foot reaction test, amateurs showed a reaction time of 1.033±0.22 seconds and professionals 1.140±0.38 seconds (p = 0.680).