Are goaltenders really “wired differently”?
Are defensemen calmer by nature?
Are forwards inherently more volatile?

In this episode of the Coretex Athletic Review, I examine a peer-reviewed study that puts long-standing hockey stereotypes under the microscope—not by testing performance or brain activity, but by exploring how players perceive each other.

Using a social-psychology lens, this episode looks at whether perceived personality differences between hockey positions reflect true dispositional differences—or whether they are products of role demands, social identity, and in-group bias.

• Why hockey positions function as powerful social categories

• The Big Five personality framework and how it’s used in sport psychology

• How players rate themselves versus how they rate positions

• Common stereotypes associated with forwards, defensemen, and goaltenders

• Evidence of in-group bias across positions

• Why perceived differences are stronger than actual personality differences

• How coaches may unintentionally confuse role demands with personality traits

The strongest differences weren’t found in who players are—but in how players see each other.

This episode is less about proving stereotypes right or wrong, and more about understanding how they form, why they persist, and how they influence coaching, communication, and athlete development.

Personality Traits and Stereotypes Associated with Ice Hockey Positions
Cameron, J. E., Cameron, J. M., Dithurbide, L., & Lalonde, R.
Published in Journal of Sport Behavior (2012)

Elite sport moves fast.

Athletes can be central figures in their sport one season and largely absent from the competitive conversation only a few years later. This episode explores what happens not just after sport ends, but what is quietly happening during an athlete’s prime that shapes how difficult the transition becomes.

Using a recent doctoral dissertation by Amanda Workman-Vickers (2025, West Texas A&M University), this episode examines how collegiate athletes experience the transition from being an athlete to becoming something else — and why that transition is often destabilizing without being pathological.

• The fleeting nature of status in elite sport

• Why performance often becomes a primary source of self-worth before retirement

• The concept of identity limbo

• Why sadness and gratitude frequently coexist during transition

• The importance of natural vs abrupt career endings

• How simple exit meetings can provide meaningful closure

• Study type: Qualitative, phenomenological doctoral dissertation

• Participants: 10 NCAA Division II athletes

• Sports represented: Football, basketball, baseball/softball, track & field

• Career endpoint: All athletes exhausted eligibility or graduated

Rather than framing retirement as a mental health crisis, this study highlights how identity destabilization often reflects a mismatch between the speed of high-performance systems and the slower pace of human identity adaptation.

Most athletes don’t break when sport ends.
But when performance has been doing identity work for years, the sudden loss of feedback, structure, and role clarity can leave athletes temporarily unanchored.

This episode is not a critique of sport systems — it’s an examination of how they function, and how athletes experience the transition when the system inevitably moves on.

Host: Evan Kurylo
Podcast: Coretex Athletic Review
Release Schedule: Weekly — Thursdays at 6:00 AM MST

Basketball, Goalies, and Perception–Action Asymmetries

Why might basketball be a useful complementary sport for hockey goaltenders?

In this episode, I explore that question through the lens of perception, not conditioning or skill transfer in the traditional sense. The discussion starts with multi-sport participation and why transfer appears more likely when sports share similar perceptual problems, even if the movements themselves are different.

Using an older, Russian psychology paper as a starting point, I look at how athletes’ perception of space may become directionally tuned based on the demands of their sport. The study compared young basketball and hockey players and found that spatial representation differed depending on whether the sport primarily operated in the vertical plane (basketball) or the horizontal plane (hockey).

The authors described this pattern using the term reverse perspective—a label that feels clunky and unintuitive today, but which helped surface an important idea: perception does not develop evenly. Instead, it adapts around the actions and spatial problems athletes are repeatedly asked to solve.

From there, the episode reframes the findings using a more modern concept: perception–action asymmetries. Rather than viewing these patterns as perceptual errors or distortions, they can be understood as functional adaptations—certain dimensions of space are weighted more heavily because they matter more for successful action.

The episode then brings this idea back to goaltending, examining how hockey heavily emphasizes horizontal information while still requiring accurate reads in the vertical plane through screens, tips, release height, and rebounds. Basketball is discussed not as a solution or fix, but as a different perceptual environment that may expose goalies to vertical spatial problems in ways hockey does not consistently provide.

Importantly, this episode does not argue that playing basketball will improve shot-height recognition or replace hockey-specific training. Instead, it offers a conceptual framework for thinking about athlete development: what perceptual problems are athletes actually being asked to solve, and which ones might they rarely encounter?

The goal is not prescription, but perspective.