[aiwv]

The experience of time has as much to do with focus and your capacity to take in information at a given moment. With sports, it is quite possible to play for many years and never gain enough skill to truly play well. When I have had a time slowdown experience, it has often come after a change of approach in which some aspect of the game that previously had been hidden to me is suddenly revealed. I'll never forget the time that I saw two defenders in front of me jumping up for a rebound and I was able to simultaneously see them and the trajectory of the ball and realize that they had jumped in the wrong direction and that I could easily swoop in and claim an easy offensive rebound that I wasn't even planning to go for. It was truly like bullet time in the matrix, but it was also a completely mundane event in a random pickup game with rather mediocre players (including me).

At the absolute highest level, the game plays you as much as you play it. I have the most experience with basketball, but I am certain what I'm going to say applies to other sports, including but not limited to soccer.

With a rhythmic sport like basketball, you can gain a huge advantage over most amateur players by simply learning to play with rhythm. If you can dribble rhythmically, then you free your mind up to focus on the game situation rather than the mechanics of dribbling. It becomes like improvising music. At your rhythm, the game has a pulse. In between beats of the pulse, aka your dribbles, you can analyze the situation and adapt your approach depending on the position of your teammates and the opposition. If your opponents are not playing in rhythm, then they are stagnant and it should be easy to get by them. Even if they are playing in rhythm, if you can play at a faster pace than they are, time effectively slows down for you relative to them because you can make more changes of direction than they can in a given unit of time. When you are at your best, you are simultaneously aggressive and completely passive. You are dictating the terms of engagement, but accepting whatever the game gives you, knowing that you will always have a good option (provided you have developed sufficient skills, which does take practice). This is what I mean when I say the game plays you. There is a reason why we describe great athletes as unconscious and they report having out of body experiences.

Just because you have never experienced this doesn't mean that you never will. I played basketball for more than 20 years before I had the above time slowdown experience. It only came after I had been focusing on rhythm while learning a musical instrument.