And on this one test, most other girls hockey players would too.

In my master’s thesis, I studied the effects of gender and hockey experience on the hand-eye coordination of elite hockey players.  I compared the performance on 2 basic hand-eye coordination tasks of both male and female elite players to the general population.

The coolest part of the study (other than using a $50,000 robot for one of the tests), was that my male subjects were the top 100 prospects for the 2004 and 2005 drafts.   It is pretty cool to turn on the television and watch those guys I tested almost 4 years ago, as 16 and 17 year-olds, making it big in the NHL.  It was particularly cool to  test Ovechkin (2004) and Crosby (2005).

Don’t get me wrong, it was pretty neat to test all of the elite female hockey players from the National team and the National Women’s Hockey League (now the Canadian Women’s Hockey League), but I was used to seeing those girls every day so it wasn’t quite as novel as meeting future NHL superstars.

In the hand-eye coordination test, they had to do 2 tasks:  one involved using two hands and the other one only used one hand (and involved the $50,000 robot).

Given the fact that I tested over 200 people on these tasks and was responsible for making sure that everything worked, I had gotten pretty accustomed to the tests and it made sense that I was better than 99% of the subjects that we used in the study (including Ovechkin and Crosby).

But overall, the elite female hockey players consistently out-performed the NHL draft picks on the two-handed task and were generally about equal to the men on the one-handed task.

Does this mean that female hockey players have better hand-eye coordination than male players?

Not exactly.

In general, females tend to be better at two-handed tasks than males (because we have better connectivity between the 2 sides of our brain). Sure, we may have been better at this one basic coordination task that happened in a lab setting, but that is world’s away from what goes on out on the ice.

I don’t need to do any scientific research to know that my on-ice hand-eye coordination doesn’t even come close to the skills of Ovechkin and Crosby.

But I can always say that I beat them at something.

And if you took the test, you probably would too.

~ Coach Kim