Why every player here wears a pinnie.

Walk into one of our practices and you'll see colored pinnies from the first small-sided game on. The reason is simple: on game day, players recognize their teammates by jersey color. Practice should work the same way. When two teams in gray shirts play each other, every kid has to check who's on which side before passing. That moment is then missing for the decision.

Color is one of the features our brain processes without deliberately searching. A yellow pinnie among blue ones stands out without anyone looking for it (Treisman & Gelade, 1980). It still works out of the corner of the eye, but with limits: colors can be told apart up to about 50 degrees from where you are looking, as long as the colored area is large enough. The further out, the stronger the difference has to be (Hansen, Pracejus & Gegenfurtner, 2009). A pinnie on a player's upper body is exactly that kind of large area.

Good players don't follow every teammate with their eyes. They fix their gaze on one point and keep track of the rest out of the corner of the eye (Vater, Williams & Hossner, 2020). We want to build that early: head up, see the color, pass.

To be honest: nobody has shown yet that colored pinnies train peripheral vision. In a lab study on passing decisions, jersey color made no difference. What mattered was the angle: the further out a teammate appeared, the worse the decision (Hüttermann, Smeeton, Ford & Williams, 2018). So a pinnie doesn't train anything on its own. It makes sure practice gives players the same cues as the game. Sport scientists call this representative learning design (Pinder, Davids, Renshaw & Araújo, 2011): if players have to read the same signals during the week as on Saturday, they are practicing the right thing.

How to pick the colors

• Two colors that are clearly different, ideally light against dark as well, for example yellow against navy.
• Never red against green. About eight percent of boys of European descent have red-green color vision deficiency (Birch, 2012). On a team of twelve boys, statistically one may barely be able to tell the two pinnies apart.
• Pinnies on as soon as there is an opponent, not just for the final scrimmage.

Our theses

1. Practice should use the same cues as the game. Jersey color is one of them.
2. A pinnie doesn't train anything on its own. It only works together with "head up."
3. Good pinnies differ in color and brightness. Red against green doesn't belong in the gym.

Sources

• Birch, J. (2012). Worldwide prevalence of red-green color deficiency. Journal of the Optical Society of America A, 29(3), 313–320.
• Hansen, T., Pracejus, L. & Gegenfurtner, K. R. (2009). Color perception in the intermediate periphery of the visual field. Journal of Vision, 9(4):26. doi:10.1167/9.4.26 (opens in a new tab)
• Hüttermann, S., Smeeton, N. J., Ford, P. R. & Williams, A. M. (2018). Color perception and attentional load in dynamic, time-constrained environments. Frontiers in Psychology, 9:2614. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02614 (opens in a new tab)
• Pinder, R. A., Davids, K., Renshaw, I. & Araújo, D. (2011). Representative learning design and functionality of research and practice in sport. Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 33(1), 146–155.
• Treisman, A. & Gelade, G. (1980). A feature-integration theory of attention. Cognitive Psychology, 12(1), 97–136.
• Vater, C., Williams, A. M. & Hossner, E.-J. (2020). What do we see out of the corner of our eye? The role of visual pivots and gaze anchors in sport. International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 13(1), 81–103. doi:10.1080/1750984X.2019.1582082 (opens in a new tab)

As of September 29, 2026