Abstract
The aims of this study were to develop and validate an instrument to quantitatively assess the handedness of basketballers in basketball tasks (Basketball Handedness Inventory, BaHI) and to compare it with their handedness in daily activities by the Edinburgh Handedness Inventory (EHI). The participants were 111 basketballers and 40 controls. All subjects completed the EHI and only basketballers filled in the BaHI. To validate the BaHI, a voluntary subsample of basketballers repeated the BaHI. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses supported a two-factor model. Our results show that: (i) Handedness score (R) in daily actions did not differ between basketball players (R by EHI = 69.3 ± 44.6) and the control group (R by EHI = 64.5 ± 58.6); (ii) basketballers more frequently favored performing certain sport tasks with the left hand or mixed hands (as highlighted by R by BaHI = 50.1 ± 47.1), although their choice was primarily the right hand in everyday gestures; and (iii) this preference was especially true for athletes at the highest levels of performance (R by BaHI of A1 league = 38.6 ± 58.3) and for those playing in selected roles (point guard’s R = 29.4 ± 67.4). Our findings suggest that professional training induces handedness changes in basketball tasks. The BaHI provides a valid and reliable measure of the skilled hand in basketball. This will allow coaches to assess mastery of the ball according to the hand used by the athlete in the different tasks and roles.
Highlights
Studies on cerebral dominance have found that the left hemisphere is dominant for speech and for the selection of actions and the translation of these responses into action [1]
A large majority of humans are right-handed (85% to 93% according to Raymond and Pontier [6]), left-handedness is believed to lead to some tactical advantages in those sports in which there is an opponent, such as, for example, boxing [7,8], wrestling [9], badminton [10], cricket [11], tennis [12,13], baseball [14], and volleyball [15], as well as for team sports with direct contact among players, such as basketball [16,17], football [17,18,19], rugby [17], or water polo [20]
Once the new inventory was validated, we aimed to verify: (i) Hand preference in everyday activities of basketball players compared to controls; (ii) the relation between everyday laterality and basketball laterality; and (iii) the influence of the competitive level, role, and training on basketball laterality
Summary
Studies on cerebral dominance have found that the left hemisphere is dominant for speech and for the selection of actions and the translation of these responses into action [1]. A trichotomous assessment of lateral preferences was recently suggested [4,5] since considering only the left or right preference excludes mixed handers from the analysis with a significant loss of information. A large majority of humans are right-handed (85% to 93% according to Raymond and Pontier [6]), left-handedness is believed to lead to some tactical advantages in those sports in which there is an opponent, such as, for example, boxing [7,8], wrestling [9], badminton [10], cricket [11], tennis [12,13], baseball [14], and volleyball [15], as well as for team sports with direct contact among players, such as basketball [16,17], football [17,18,19], rugby [17], or water polo [20]. In hockey and polo, the rules of the sport itself explicitly disadvantage left-handers; in polo, the mallet has to be held in the right hand on the right side of the horse, while hockey sticks come only in a right-handed
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