Staff Blog
Why Home Field Still Matters
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In the wake of the unprecedented recent success of NFL road teams much has been made of the possibility that home field advantage is mattering less and less. There are a couple basic reasons that support this: training has drastically improved, some argue, to the point where even rookies like Joe Flacco feel perfectly comfortable working with a silent snap count. The increased professionalization of the amateur game means that even the players are cutting their teeth in high pressure situations at younger and younger ages, argue others. The best high school basketball players will play nationally televised games in hostile environments from the age of 16 (or younger). Any way you look at it, suiting up in Madison Square Garden is going to be more imposing the 1st time you do it than the 5th. Also, an influx of luxury boxes and increased prices for the nearest seats means that the loudest and most aggressive fans are being pushed further and further away from the action. Simply put, new stadiums are less terrifying than old ones.
Still, all of these arguments are merely suggesting that home field advantage is becoming less of a factor, not that it doesn’t exist.
Today, in the Canadian National Post, Tom Blackwell has an article exploring why Home Field matters in the first place - and why understanding it might be able to reverse the effects. Money quotes ATJ
For Mike Bossy, playing against the Flyers in Philadelphia and playing at his New York Islanders home arena in Uniondale, N. Y., was like night and day.
The Philly crowd was outright hostile, making visiting NHL opponents feel real “trepidation,” said the ex-New York scoring great. Competing at the Islanders’ Nassau Colliseum, on the other hand “made you feel like you had the upper hand right from the outset.”
This in and of itself isn’t shcoking. Home field advantage is well documented, and matters. What may be important is new research that suggests the advantage may have as much to do with human biology as psychology - i.e. your mind isn’t scared, your body is.
Hockey players had much higher levels of testosterone after a winning game on home ice than after a similarly victorious match-up away from home, according to a study published in the American Journal of Human Biology.
It is not clear what triggered the hormone boost. But “a rise in status (i. e. competitive victory) in front of friends and family members may be an especially potent stimulus for the endocrine system,” the paper said.
The original researchers then hint at further findings which suggest that this biological effect might be combated. That an innovative coach might be able to trick his players into feeling at home on the road - the experiencing the benefits of doing so - simply by showing the team video of a victorious home court game immediately before a big road tilt.
Part of this strikes me as obvious.This, of course, isn’t exactly groundbreaking. To borrow an example from the story, it’s not exactly breaking news that watching Rocky gets you hype. Coaches and captains give pregame speeches for just this reason before nearly every athletic event. The takeaway from this may be as simple as “good leaders lead good teams.”
Still, it might be a little more subtle than that. If you video of yourself hitting ten consecutive jump shots you’re probably going to walk into a gym shooting better than if you had watched a video of yourself missing those ten shots. Part of this is emotional, sure, but a bigger part is may be muscle memory. Shots aren’t made or miss by chance, and watching the form on the ten made shots would presumably be better than that of the missed attempts. Maybe that is the change. For years visiting coaches have attempted to change how their players think about playing on foreign soil, maybe they should have been trying to change how their teams play there.
Either way, it is an interesting article and provides some food for thought.
