Elite sport offers a suitable setting to understand the ability to anticipate future events—a phenomenon that is central to animal life. Critically, however, whilst anticipation in sport has been studied for several decades, there have been few attempts to understand its development throughout childhood and adolescence. Additionally, whilst it is widely acknowledged that the need to anticipate emerges from temporal pressure, there has been no effort to understand the nonlinear effect that temporal demands have on the development of anticipatory skill. This is important as its consequences have different implications for sports authorities compared to an individual player. To bridge the gap in our understanding, this article draws attention to the mathematical concepts of concavity and convexity to explain the nonlinear relationship between temporal demands and the development of anticipatory skill. This viewpoint has implications for the design of junior sport, including the modification of rules, which has gained worldwide interest in recent years.

精英运动提供了一个合适的环境来理解预测未来事件的能力——一种对动物生命至关重要的现象。然而，至关重要的是，虽然对运动的预期已经研究了几十年，但很少有人试图了解它在整个童年和青春期的发展。此外，虽然人们普遍认为预测的需要来自时间压力，但没有人努力理解时间需求对预期技能发展的非线性影响。这很重要，因为与单个球员相比，其后果对体育当局有不同的影响。为了弥合我们理解上的鸿沟，本文提请注意凹凸的数学概念，以解释时间需求与预期技能发展之间的非线性关系。这种观点对青少年运动的设计具有启示意义，包括近年来引起全世界关注的规则修改。