As Greater Western Sydney strives to claim the AFL's Holy Grail -- the premiership cup -- the club's academy director is searching for his own version of the mythical Christian drinking vessel.
John Quinn's quest is to find a way to measure and train a crucial mental aspect of sports performance - decision-making. While athletes have long pushed the boundaries of physical development, Quinn is desperate to unlock the secret behind some players' ability to appear to make time slow down as they make multiple, quick-fire decisions under pressure.
He and the Giants have even invested $25,000 on a pair of high-tech eye-tracking glasses, which Quinn hopes can one day help him train decision-making.
Quinn -- who enjoyed a long and distinguished career coaching athletics and working at Essendon before joining the Giants as head of sports science and then moving to drive the club's academy - believes improving decision-making could significantly improve an athlete's performance.
"If you measure it, you can control it. Right now, I can measure things like speed, change of direction, leap and endurance, but I can't measure decision-making," Quinn told ESPN ahead of the Giants' second ever finals series.
"That's been the Holy Grail for me ever since I started working in the AFL. That's the million-dollar question - but we've got to determine whether we can actually measure decision-making before we can then look to improve it."
Quinn believes helping athletes make better decisions under pressure would have wide-ranging ramifications not just on performance, but for the entire athletic talent identification process.
"Decision-making is absolutely vital for almost all sports," he said. "The best players are those who seem to have an eternity of time. Look at Jonathan Thurston in the NRL - he seems to have a bubble around him where it looks like he can do whatever he pleases. Then there's Ronaldo in soccer, or going back a few years, [John] McEnroe and [Bjorn] Borg in tennis - they seemed to have extra time to execute their skills. But they don't have more time, they're just quicker in making decisions.
"[And if] an athlete has superior decision-making ... then it increases the potential for list development drastically - there's so many 17 or 18-year-olds out there who get overlooked [by AFL recruiters] because they're perceived to be slow, yet we're missing out on one of the great requirements of the sport. Is it more important for a player to run fast or make a decision under pressure? You could argue both.
"It's a vital part of coaching that we've never really addressed properly and I'm pretty excited about what we hope changes the way we select players and coach players, and change the way sport is approached internationally."
Deakin University Associate Professor Paul Gastin, course director of the school's Bachelor of Exercise and Sport Science degree, agrees with Quinn that training athletes' mental capabilities would lead to better performance.
He said it was often too difficult to recreate game-like environments during training, but that may soon change.
"Our understanding and application of physical and technical skill development is much more advanced than our ability to train tactical awareness, decision-making, handling pressure and team dynamics," he told ESPN.
"One of the challenges is the inability to recreate the competitive environment in training - firstly it's not real and secondly if you try to make it real, which is very difficult anyway, it can introduce excessive physical load and increase injury risk.
"Technology such as virtual reality may help overcome this. Players need to be able to see things in real-time and from multiple perspectives - to see the play options and to make the best decision, and to have the opportunity experiment with different scenarios. Recreating the match using virtual reality so the player can be immersed in the situation, rather than simply watching a 2D video reply from a single camera angle, has great potential.
"It will likely be driven in partnership with the entertainment and gaming industries as video, sensor, player eye-tracking and performance analysis data from elite sport teams are integrated into VR solutions."
Quinn is working with PhD students Lael Kassem and Andrew Sharp, in conjunction with Western Sydney University, in the hope of one day measuring and training decision-making.
A key tool his team uses is a specially-made pair of eye-tracking glasses made in Switzerland. When a Giants player wears the glasses, Quinn and his team can effectively see what the player is seeing, meaning their eye movement patterns and decision-making can be monitored.
"I want to know how their eyes move, to put it in layman's terms," Quinn said. "If their eyes are moving very quickly, it means they're indecisive. If they make their decision quickly and lock in on one or two areas, then that's someone who's better at decision-making. So I want to know - is that measurable and is that a trait that can be trained?
"The glasses we use ... used to be like the old virtual reality goggles - quite cumbersome, but now they're like standard eye glasses. They are quite intricate in that not only am I able to see what the player is seeing, those glasses are measuring [an athlete's] eye movement and then putting that into a mathematical formula so I can compare that to other players that we're looking at.
"At the moment we're just collecting the data and to be honest, it's probably raising more questions than answers.
"We're probably 12 months away from having a very strong answer to say - yes you can identify it [decision-making] just like you can speed or power, and yes you can train it. As to what extent? I suspect it will be a very individual thing."
Gastin said athletes would likely respond even better to emerging technology when it was less invasive.
"Technology continues to advance and become smaller, more intuitive and integrated. However, it still tends to be invasive," he said.
"Athletes and coaches want to get on with training and preparing - minimising any inconvenience, or distraction, or set-up time, or the wearing of non-standard clothing or devices is not in their best interests. Integration within standard clothing and equipment such as balls, racquets or glasses, will increasingly become the norm."
As for the future, Quinn envisages the same technology possibly being used by every player on the field, with live data being captured and analysed by coaches.
"I can remember when they brought out the GPS units that players now wear - it was almost like getting around with half a house brick attached to the back of your neck and now they're the size of a matchbox," he said. "I know there's technology to reduce that down to a strip of thread - but the nanotechnology is just too expensive at the moment. But maybe in another 10 years the GPS data may be in players' jumpers.
"So maybe these glasses in the future, the technology could be in soft contact lenses that a player could even wear in a game, and coaches could see what their players are seeing in real-time.
"I don't think that's far away."