Net Sports: The Logic of Volleyball & Tennis

The NCAA Volleyball championships ended this week with a dominant performance by the University of Texas team. Their women played a superb power game while displaying uncanny and tenacious digging defense as they cruised past Oregon. The tournament games represented the epitome of the logic of net games where a net separates the two teams or opponents as in tennis.

The separation created by the net creates a dynamic different than contact team sports because it prohibits opponents from physically impacting a player to throw that player off his or her execution. This insulation from physical impact whether a tackle, block, bump, grab or check that dominates football, soccer or modern basketball means that that no one can lay a body on you and knock you our of your rhythm or skill by sheer physical impact or violence. This displaces the role of intimidation and forces players and teams to rely more on intellectual strategic and tactical misdirection to throw players out of their games.

The separation from physical buffeting permits a premium focus upon skill and form without the need for massive muscular or mental ferocity to fight through the physical assault upon body and form in contact sports. This freedom from physical intimidation permits focus proficiency and minute gradations that are often impossible to sustain in execution in “contact” sports.

I cannot emphasize enough how net sports channel strength and skill development into pure form and coordination rather than the type of strength, aggression and ferocity needed to fight through contact sport. This is not football with its violent and planned collisions and it is not basketball or soccer with its “incidental” but endless contact (I won’t even talk about hockey with its legalized brawling). The open space of net sports permits players to execute in space and time free of the manhandling of contact. It also, like baseball, isolates a very fine-grained form of evident responsibility for one’s actions in coordination with others.

It also leads to a different mental mind-set. The physical structure of the court amplifies this. Unlike flow sports that move from one basket/goal/end zone to another and can expand the field of play, the field of play remains rigidly circumscribed. Players have nowhere to go with no movement away from their spot to the other end of the court of field. Each player has responsibility for the space they control and intricate moving relations, almost balletic, with each other once action starts. This circumscribed court emphasizes and rewards quickness and lightening pattern recognition and reaction time over pure speed that open fields or sprints to the other end of a two ended field requires. 

Players possess autonomy in their space. They are responsible for their side of the court as in tennis or their part of the court in volleyball. It requires players to play both offense and defense but in the same space with the same patterns rather than moving suddenly to the other end of the field to reposition. Although like football and other reset sports, it permits the player or team to reset after each point and prepare for the play rather than the pure flow sports such as soccer or lacrosse or water polo. This permits players and coaches to develop superb and unfettered skill sets because no one is physically disrupting their actions. It means plays and schemes exist with a relative clarity of purpose and execution. This enables a form of beauty that can exist almost unsullied such as the perfection of a serve or beauty of a return at full extension or a magnificent dig that requires immense physical courage and skill and body control all at the same time. The athlete’s body exists alone in space and time unimpeded by contact with other opponents.  Net sports isolate responsibility in a visible and inescapable manner since no one is disrupting them.

This capacity to execute plays without opponents contact puts a premium upon speed and precision and almost unconscious situational awareness of where teammates are. At the same time the attack/defense dynamic moves from one of pure strength and bullying through or towards the goal and relies upon reaction and throwing off the anticipated system and flow of the other team. Because the opponents cannot use physical strength or bullying, teams and players have to rely upon skill, tactical placement, disturbing rhythms and immense speed and precision in their response.

The placement of the ball dominates the movement and tactics. The serve, the return or in volleyball the serve reception that then gets the ball to the setter determine almost everything. The teams must move incredibly fast given the speed or placement of serves and adapt quickly and in a meticulous choreographed manner.

Offense and defense depend upon the mind and patterns recognition and incredible speed of reaction. This is true of all elite one on one competition, but the net court remains fixed and static. All this occurs in a defined area that cannot be expanded through movement up and down the court. This closure of the court intensifies the speed of reaction time and minimizes the time to see the pattern and react.

Sometimes players are strong enough to simply overpower the other side with blistering serves or power hits that move so fast they go over or through blocks. But more often, players must place the serve at a precise spot with differential speed or spin. The serve seeks to throw the receiver off their best return. In tennis a fine serve forces the returner to a weakened or misplaced return that in many ways determines the point that may not end until five hits later. Likewise in volleyball serve receive remains stunningly important. If the receiver cannot get it to the setter in the right place, the set will be off either in terms of space or position on the court. This throws off the entire scheme; again the point may be over even though it takes five or six hits to get there.

Placement, speed, deception, misdirection all matter in direct competition team sports but they reach their purest form in net sports because the opponent does not have the option of pushing or blocking or checking someone out of the way. Opponents must draw each other out of position with tactical insight and physical or psychological misdirection. The mind and skill must win, not just physical disruption.

Because of this structure the serve dominates net sports in unique ways almost equivalent to the importance of the pitch in baseball. The baroque techniques and rococo gyrations of table tennis serves highlight this domination and importance to incongruous extremes.

Because of the structure as both a net sport and a reset sport, the serve and serve reception overwhelm all other aspects of the sport. Serves are the one moment when the player is alone, unfettered and has complete control of their actions, much like the pitcher in baseball.

The primacy of the serve places immense emphasis upon developing complex, powerful and intriguing serves. Sheer speed is not enough. Elite defenders quickly master the speed serve. Players need accuracy and diversity. If a defender only has to master one serve reception, they can anticipate and pounce. Volleyball manifests this in unique ways because six separate players will serve, and each player can bring a unique skill, rhythm, and speed to the game. Raw power serves may be the most fun but can be the most predictable. On the other hand floaters that land in defender’s chest or exactly between two zones or a drop serve the slices into the back of a players hit can force maximum extension and deflate the serve return. This displaces the offense set up and can be far more devastating than a big booming serve. Of course the most fun lies in the ACE where a serve blows past or forces an error by the receiver and the player or team win the point without any return. Aces can be tactically demoralizing, bring in the spectators and win points without exertion of the rest of the team. They can tempt some players or teams to over rely upon them, but when they occur, can be beautiful.

No one interferes with the serve—it remains just you and the ball—that’s it. Along with pitching, serving represents one of the purest moments in all sports. It isolates the athlete, the athlete’s skill and the requirements of a situation. For instance the type of serve will change depending upon the serve reception skill of the opponent; it will change depending upon the rhythm or expectation built up at that point in the game; it will change depending upon one’s own capacity to hit aces; it changes depending upon how important the point is and how much pressure is upon both server and receiver; it changes depending upon the noise or excitement or stress emanating from the spectators and fans. Elite serving requires immense situational awareness, exceptional self-control and superb skill. Modern rally scoring amplifies this because missing a serve gives a point to the other side as well as returning the serve to the other side in volleyball, while in tennis it gives away a point when all the advantages are on one’s own side.

The situational pressures exist in the mind. In net sports, the mind and discipline remain supreme, I don’t care how supremely skilled or focused an athletes is the unexpected surprise and intimidation of physical contact, legal or illegal, designed to destroy a person’s concentration or skillful execution changes everything. It emphasizes another kind of bigger/faster/stronger to fight off physical battering.

The structure of each cluster of sports generates their own logic of completion and excellence.  Parallel competitive sports like swimming or a reset sport like football or volleyball/tennis have their own dynamics and logics. And these shape the type of training and person and dynamic and action. The net sports present their own logics of execution, precision and, above all, intense initiating and reactive intelligence.

Maria Sharapova and the Dilemma of Beauty and Sport

Every girl or woman who plays sports knows the unfairness. No matter how skilled or talented, every female knows her appearance will be judged as she plays her sport. She may win, she may lose, but her looks and beauty will be assessed. No women enjoy this, some benefit from it, most resent it but all female athletes have to grapple with it. In the end the only way to silence the beauty obsession of the male gaze lies in triumph with skill. Maria Sharapova’s win at the French Open illustrates the dilemma in all its unfairness.

Maria Sharapova is a beautiful woman. Tall, blond, svelte muscled, cheek-bones, graceful and spirited. In 2004 at 17 she won Wimbledon and in four years had picked up three grand slams. She earns an estimated 22.5 million dollars a year in endorsements, the best-paid female athlete in the world. Yet she has not been ranked number 1 since 2008 and won no grand slams in the last 3 years. Her income towers over tennis players, male and female, far more highly ranked and often more skilled.

Players seethe believing correctly that her looks and personality factored more highly than her skill in her endorsements. This was not the confluence of beauty and dominance that Tiger Wood exploited. She played erratically and never really dominated the circuit, only reaching number one ranking 5 times.  She lived in the shadow of Serena Williams’ unearthly skill. She presented as the poster child for beauty mattering more than skill or talent in women’s sports.

Her beauty was magnified by the fact that she played a beautiful game, tennis, grunts and shrieks aside. Women’s tennis outfits leave little to the imagination and modern styles permit a wide array of dress—both Sharapova and Serena Williams have made a minor sport of watching their outfits.

Tennis is unforgiving. As a net sport that divides players from physical contact, tennis allows the beauty of the game to unfold with etched clarity since the line and power of movement and hitting are not marred by 240 pound linebackers trying to disrupt your play. It places heavy emphasis upon the tactics and strategy which are determined mainly by the opponent’s mind and skill, not by their physical ability to disrupt you.

This makes it a game of nano-inches, close calls and split second judgments. The sheer speed and size of modern players has all but eliminated classic net games. Power serves easily reach win percentages of 80 percent, and the game often ends up a seemingly endless grunting groundstrokes of stupendous power and accuracy as each player vies to set up the other, then slice, drop or angle shot. It’s a game that isolates each player. You can see every facial expression, every emotion, every strain of the body. Millions of spectators have watched great players implode on the court while others harden and recover themselves and come back with steely resolve.

Here is where the dilemma lies. The convergence of sheer physical beauty does not always play fair with sport talent. Many people watch sport for the beauty of the game. Sometimes they are not even aware of it, but the pleasure and awe at great plays is experienced palpably by a fan. We all admire and enjoy the aesthetic aspect of sports.

Greek art idealized the beauty of form and physical male bodies. We do it in our own pictures, just look at the plays and players in the average media outlets or the highlights of ESPN; they all draw attention to the beauty of the plays. These plays exhibit the athletic beauty of the players. We do not notice their physical looks, appearance or amount of skin showing when they execute. ESPN highlights do not caress the physical appearance of the person but the physical and mental execution of the player.

In the Greek Olympics writers raved about the physical beauty of the male athletes. Many, male and female, lusted after them. The winners and the beautiful ones got endorsements and gifts and status. Gladiators in Rome were similarly lionized with fame, status and art. But the art selectively emphasized only the good-looking ones, not the not so good-looking ones. It even made scars look good.

We are not Greeks or Romans and seldom worship the male form. But we do give endorsement deals to great male athletes, but by and large, the better-looking athletes and the great personality athletes, get the better deals. Think Tom Brady or Tiger Woods or the number of deal amassed by RG3 before he has even started a football game.

Women face the dilemma that they are judged by looks first, and many male fans cannot get beyond that. Broadcasters may want female athletes to look good for ratings but that double standard means people take them less seriously as athletes. It forces women’s team who seek male viewers to highlight physical appearance and sexuality. Once watching viewers can easily be converted to enjoy the game itself. It happens every four years with beach volleyball and the Olympics.

So as long as the majority of people who take sports seriously are men and the women’s sports and their sponsors need male viewers, teams and marketers will emphasize appearance, looks and sex appeal. They have to rely on the game to keep them there and it happens a surprising amount of the time.

I wish it were different, but it is not. I mean can you ever see a woman getting away with Pablo Sandoval’s girth in San Francisco and becoming an adored “Kung Fu Panda?”

So female athletes rightly resent how male notions of beauty and male obsessions with female sexuality drive their sports to market the way they do and award endorsements—remember the endorsements follow as much appearances but the society has a much wider tolerance for male homeliness.

But back to Sharapova. She kept up her endorsement level even when she stumbled in play, tore her rotator cuff and had surgery and did not win consistently for three years. Her beauty carried her, not her playing.

But at this year’s French Open she played on her worst surface, clay, that nullified her power ground shots and slicing angles. She wore a little black dress and beat a younger woman wearing pink. She won with laser shots skimming the nets, strong accurate serves and total command of the tactics of the court.

But more importantly she has carved out a story beyond her beauty. This win gave her a career grand slam.

The win revealed, as do the lines of her maturing face, the mental toughness and tenacity that always informed her game. She achieved too much too fast, faltered and then struggled through a debilitating injury, surgery and harsh rehab where she fell to 126 in the world. At the French Open she won on the surface where she had always lost.

In her comments, the reality of the athlete behind the beauty, the athlete’s mental beauty poured out, “I could have said, 'I don't need this. I have money, I have fame, I have victories, I have Grand Slams.' But when your love for something is bigger than all those things, you continue to keep getting up in the morning when it's freezing outside, when you know that it can be the most difficult day, when nothing is working, when you feel like the belief sometimes isn't there from the outside world, and you seem so small…But you can achieve great things when you don't listen to all those things."

When she fell to the ground in tears; she wept for joy but also for vindication. Her triumph triumphed over the beauty obsession and reminded everyone that skill and strength demonstrate the deeper beauty of sport.