Expert athletes are able to offload much of the mental processing of their game to the subconscious. We all do this to some degree (most of us aren't solving differential equations in real time to catch a ball), but great athletes are able to do this for many more sport specific tasks than casual players.
Here's a mindblowing video of Ronaldo making a goal in complete darkness after only seeing the first few milliseconds of the ball path: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t03LHpeWnpA&t=330s