The Wisdom of Athlete Cliches

In one of my favorite sport movies Bull Durham, Ebby Calvin “Nuke” LaLoosh, “the million dollar arm with a five cent brain,” asks his grizzled mentor, Crash Davis, to “teach” me more stuff. Crash sits him down on their rickety bus and says, "it’s time to talk about clichés." He begins with “I am just happy to be here.”

How many times have you listened to the same words or variations from athletes as they answer the same hackneyed question for the umpteenth time? Consider that a midlevel major league player would be asked similar questions by multiple reporters over 900 times a year.

Athlete speak seems to involve what Washington, D.C. would call a “non-answer answer.” It sounds like an answer but has absolutely zero content. Now these answers evolve for reasons. First, no athlete wants to call out or publically insult teammates or members of the other team. Athletes have to play every day with each other. Real problems are hashed out in private. Second, no athlete wants to give the other team motivation for a game or insight into a team’s problems. In pro sports, athletes will move across several teams and no player wants to alienate or insult someone who may be a teammate next week or next year.

What do we want them to say? “W botched the double play because he played out of position or X missed the ball because he was not only not playing to the scout or Y misread the trajectory and broke wrong?” He could no more say that Z was out too late with his mistress and not as fully focused as he could be. Come on guys! The need to protect team cohesion and relations, as well as the endless sameness of the questions and situations abrade the answers and wear away all the externals. The clichés gleam like polished rocks eroded and buffed by hot air and weather of media storms.

I believe, however, that athlete speak also contains some strong and consistent wisdom that athletes and coaches do believe and that are worth listening to. At the end of a recent come from behind over time victory, the Seahawks young and very smart quarterback Russell Wilson described the mood in the locker room at the half time after the Seawhawks had been soundly trounced for 30 minutes. Wilson feels not only smart but genuine and is too young to have built up the smooth deflective armor of words and poise that many veterans adopt to protect themselves. Here is what he said:

"The mood in the locker room was unbelievable," he insisted. "We knew that if we could just hang in there, if we could just play one play at a time, stay in the moment...and we did throughout the entire second half."

Now the reality is that most cliches began as and in fact still reflect deep truths. They become cliches by repetition and trained ignoring. Wilson in fact described exactly what the battered but not beaten Seahawks did.

Athletes and trained professionals have worked hard to practice reflectively and train their emotions and cognitive responses. They respond under great pressure with quick decisions that reflect perception of what the situation requires, coordination with fellow players and execution based upon powerful and trained pattern recognition and cognitive and emotionally united instincts. Often the cliches refer to these practices lying below the surface of actions. 

For instance, it is absolutely critical to "play one play at a time." The most dangerous thing an athlete can do is carry the emotional dredges of the past mistakes or success into the next play. This distracts from full attention and can code the execution either with too little or too much optimism. Emotions impact all performance and it is critical to let them go each play. One step at a time matters as a way to live and overcome adversity and stay on track when a person is ahead. The Seahawks, their coaches and their execution focused upon each play without giving up or pressing too hard.

High level performance requires being totally present to each moment. Elite athletic competition requires supreme pattern recognition from players and coaches. Being in the moment means players put aside emotional and physical and external distractions to bring their entire and multi-dimensional attention to bear at each moment of the competition. This can lead to interceptions, stopped plays or break aways or simply superb execution that wins a critical third down on a stalled drive. High performance achievement requires this ability to be entirely present to oneself, call upon one's skills and be present and connected to team mates and the opposition. This being present, playing one play at a time and persevering lay the emotional and psychological foundation of situational awareness that sets timely interceptions, blocks, sacks or brilliant runs.

Finally the Seahawks just kept at it with consistency. They endured mistakes and successes. Did not matter, but they kept present, focused upon execution of each play and gradually built up momentum and scored and chipped away.

Wilson in his thoughtful and balanced way described what many athletes have said thousands fo times and been ignored, but he spoke the truth and told exactly what happened at an attention based focused level.
Athletic wisdom may sound like cliches but it embodies serous wisdom and a way of being in harsh competition.

So professional athletes and most visible elite athletes draw upon a standard repertoire of answer across all sports. Consider:

• We just take it one day at a time.
• I do my best and the good Lord willing, I will get better.
• We just have to go out and try our best each day.
• He’s a competitor and never gives up, so he came through.
• We all have days like this  (could be good or bad).
• The other guys picked me up.
• I want to compliment the other team; they played a great game.
• I couldn’t t have done it without the rest of the team.
• Just go to let it go. Tomorrow is another game.
• Guys are not focused. We have to be focused out there.
• We need to work on that in practice.
• We’re in a groove, on a wave, in the flow and will ride it.
• Sometimes you win. Sometimes you lose. That’s the game.

Each of the phrases divulges a real truth about sport. The fundamental rule of all sport must be to take it one day, one episode, one moment at a time. Sport involve constant failures. If a player lets a dropped pass stay with them or a strikeout or missed jump shot, then the memory and upset from the failure will poison and undermine their next pass, next shot or next strike. Elite athletes must have no memory from one moment to another.

Elite athletes like any of us who seek to strive and succeed, need to remember Kipling’s injunction in IF: “If you can meet with triumph and disaster 
And treat those two imposters just the same.”

The mental and emotional discipline of being focused on each moment, each pitch, each movement of the person you guard, each set and pattern before you defines the attention of a fine athlete. Athletes must be totally present and aware and attuned; they must bring their best attention and effort on each play because at the elite level small mistakes or miscues lead to immense and brutal consequences. So competitors never give up and achievers remain focused.

In competition if athletes let their emotions get the best of them,they lose focus. If they let the other team get into their heads or let their own emotional anger at the other team influence them, it can subtly lower performance or lead to overcompensation. It opens them and their team to being angered or thrown off their concentration by the other team.

Staying focused but also staying connected to their team remain essential. Team members may not like each other but have to trust to commit to their own expertise and place. If a player tries to do too much because they don’t’ trust their team, a player will get out of place and upset a formation or play. A player will leave openings and overcompensate and the other team will adjust and exploit it. So trusting and relying on their teammates and acknowledging them is critical, just as critical as respecting and acknowledging the other team when the opponents play well. That respect and acknowledgement can trump simmering anger or resentment that the other team may seek and exploit.

All of us and all athletes have those moments, those wonderful transcendent moments when we are in the flow. The moment when we are living at our highest potential and our skills and practice and training come together. It can feel like an epiphany, but when we have them, like Crash Davis says you have to “respect the streak” and we have to respect our performance and ourselves.

So we all have days like this and sometimes you win and sometimes you lose, but you carry on, you show up and you do your job. And every athlete does know in his or her heart of heart that Crash is right, “I am just happy to be here.” That is life, not just sport. Trite, but true.

Sports Ethics: Don't Try too Hard

It sounds counterintuitive—“don’t try too hard?” When we are struggling, shouldn’t we just try harder? I have been following the comments of Mariner’s players at spring training and all their comments converge on the same set of insights about high performance. A young Mariner’s pitcher Danny Hultzen spoke about adjusting during a game, “A year ago I probably would have even tried harder to just get the pitch there instead of just relaxing and calming down." Hultzen’s work involved a mind set change, and the rest of the game he excelled. Not trying too hard points to the importance of how top professionals work best and how to manage effort and practice in a productive way. 

Top professionals devote immense hours to practice and learning to achieve. Real masters have invested at least 5-7,000 hours at their craft. They constantly practice and more important learn from mistakes. Their lives reflect endless adaptation to changes in environment, changes in their own skill set and studying their successes and mistakes. High performing professionals adjust to people and environments.

I have talked about this before as one of the great strengths and dangers to athletic and professional excellence. Sometimes the problems with performance flow from failure of technique or erosion of skill, sometimes from adaptations of the other side. In the middle of a game and performance—players are tempted to “try harder.” Coaches and teammates exhort them, “just try harder.”

Trying harder is not exactly the same as another phrase “bear down” which demands more focused attention and being present to situational awareness. Trying harder usually means the player or professional has to step back from what they are doing, think about it and then “fix” it through exertion of energy.

Trying harder in the midst of a game erodes the entrenched expertise and pattern recognition of a high performing professional. Trying means a player willfully and self-consciously pushes him or herself. They exert more energy or effort simply for the purpose of exerting more energy.

This exertion can be mental in trying to overthink a technical adaption or in trying to outthink the opposition. Once a player enters this mind space, he or she has essentially lost the emotional mind game. They are no longer present to the situation. He or she no longer relies on the fine-grained pattern recognition and split second perception and skill deployment they have practiced. They tighten up mentally.

They also tighten up physically. Their self-conscious mental effort and internal command to try harder sends urgent messages to the body that launch high levels of cortisol and adrenaline that wrecks havoc on timing and rhythm. These responses narrow the perceptual field.

The mental reaction slows down reaction times with a mental screen interfering. A physiological reaction increases the response with too much strength or speed. Beyond inappropriate energy distribution, players over anticipate and commit too early on an action permitting the opponent to fool them.

Athletes use a large number of terms to identify the same phenomenon—players press or force actions. This pressing grows from trying too hard and ends up with a mismatch between energy/speed of a player’s action with the requirements of a situation.

When the Seattle Seahawks came from 21 points down to win a game, their Coach Pete Carroll addressed the very issue. He mentioned that the team and coaches had actually practices this scenario during preseason practice in order to focus the energy and words of coaches. Carroll then pointed out the danger. When teams are down and start to get anxious and press, execution and forcing it come into play.  "The problem," Carroll explained, " is they overtly and we need patience. Literally you are  going to have to go one play at a time." Cliched wisdom matters here for coaches and players who have to rein in their anxiety and focus. Carroll spoke again of how the coaches had to "direct our language in the right direction." This meant no panic driven emotional speeches, but concise and directive and strong places. As he said, "you can't win it on the first possession." 

Creating a culture where coaches especially have the knowledge and trust to build in patience and convey this is critical. 

Hultzen is a young pitcher and when he fell behind, he had the common tendency to try and “spot” or “overthrow.” This impatience leads  pitchers to miss their slots or lose rhythm. A player loses consistency because he or she tries to reinvent each pitch. Quarterbacks, basketball shooters, tennis serves all suffer form same response.  

Once players try too hard, it permits opponents to dictate the game. Players who are trying to hard become predictable and less quick. They over anticipate while having slippage in reaction times because they grow to mistrust their own skills. This permits opponents to dominate with feints and misdirection or even beat more talented or skilled players who are confused and off their game. Teams dominate another team when other players press and try too hard losing their rhythm and undermining skill. This creates a vicious cycle that undermines confidence, leads to more trying and even greater futility. 

Worse, trying too hard becomes a mental distraction for the players. Trying too hard turns mental energy into a spiral of self-criticism, failed experiments and loss of confidence. The spiral is hard to break. Ex General Manager Bill Polian talks about how critical this is to good coaches “In order to perform well as an athlete you need to be single-minded, focused on the job at hand, right down to the minute details. If that focus is shattered, if you're distracted, you do not perform as well.” The paradox becomes the harder a person tries the worse the distraction becomes.

Brendan Ryan who plays gorgeous short-stop for the Mariners but remains one of the most cringe-worthy hitters in the American league describes the cycle perfectly:

"My thing was, I have got to try harder. Get in the cage and spend more time there.”…"What I think happens most of the time is the harder you try, the harder it gets and things start to snowball. Maybe the biggest thing is confidence, going up there and believing something good was going to happen.

"It just felt all year I would get the count to that pitch, I would get the pitch and just miss it. It might even turn into a walk but you don't even feel good about that because you knew you should have hit that pitch and you should have been standing on second. The frustration just kept building."

Mike Morse a new Mariner teammate gets at a basic point of professional high performance, “Guys are more relaxed, and when you’re relaxed your talent comes out.” 

No one suggests not working or practicing to refine expertise or adapt to changes. "if at first you don't succeed, try try again," still carries real weight, but what matters is how a person tries and the mind set of learning and integrating learning, not just pure effort. It all depends upon the mind-set of the effort. Relaxing means not placing the mental screen in place that slows reaction and induces inappropriate levels of effort. It requires a letting go and being present to permit the well trained and refined expertise to be released.

It reduces to trusting the work you have done prior to the moment in the game. Trusting that skill, trusting to micro-adaptions in the moment and trusting to the trained situational awareness you have developed.

As Danny Hultzen stated so simply, “just relax.”

Sports Ethics: "Let's Do This"

I was at a Husky women's basketball game last week near the bench. Fans are screaming and the score is tight. Pressure rises.   The team huddles, listens to the coach and right before breaking, the team leaders yells, “let’s do this!”

It’s a strong appeal that we hear in all aspects of life, and I believe it carries real ethical and psychological power. Let’s parse out the meaning and power of this classic sports exhortation.

“Let’s Do This!” demands action. Leaders exhort their group to unite and take action in sport and life. The phrase commands a moral and psychological demand that focuses the quest for excellence and victory in sports and life. The words parse out in a very critical way that makes real sense in sport but in life.

THIS—An indefinite pronoun situates athletes and people in an immediate context. No one needs to spell it out. The word informs everyone that the task exists immediately before the group. High performing individuals and athletes live in the exact moment being fully aware of the situational complexity of what they face and whom their opponents are and what obstacles confront them. THIS needs no explication. It assumes that the individual team members all make themselves fully present. They know the goal and know the tasks. The word assumes and demands situational awareness.

LET’S—(Let Us) A compound verb/object accomplishes two vital goals. The US pinpoints every person as members of a team with a common goal. The phrase unites the team and creates a shared sense of responsibility. Using these words puts everyone on notice that no one person can do this. Everyone must contribute and must fully engage right now at this point in time with this task confronting them.

Underlying the assertion of a team identity and responsibility lies the belief that everyone bonded by the call possesses the knowledge and the skill to accomplish a task. Individuals make this claim when they can presume an history—that the individuals in the huddle have practiced and mastered skill and coordinated activity. The claim welds together a group identity and responsibility with a shared expertise and focus.

But the US only covers the contraction aspect. “LET” unleashes another active imperative. This phrase is not a question and it is not a request. The word let has a sort of subjunctive mode to it, a should, an imperative dimension. But rather than just a direct order—“do this now,” “I command  you” or “I order you.” The verb infers an authoritative or commanding invitation as in let’s go to the beach or let’s go inside. Let’s is ambiguous enough to hint that the person uttering it does not possess full authority to order or chooses not to. Rather “let us” or let’s invites people to commit. The authority hides behind and reinforces the team identity.

Let’s addresses each member of the team as an imperative to pull together, to act together and stake their identities together in THIS task before them. The locution flattens the hierarchy of authority and elicits dedication rather than subordination. It brings commitment not just compliances.

That is why the locution is so interesting and important in sports and life. The moral import of the phrase involves a coming together for a shared purpose as a team to achieve the task in front of the group.

DO—Simple, clean and to the point. The verb do grows from deep linguistic roots endures as one of the oldest and most direct action words in English. The verb promises to act, to put in place  andto make happen. A promise and direction cannot be more simple and more direct.

Just like the “this,” the verb do does not specify the exact action, rather it means that the group will perform what is necessary to achieve the goal. By its very imperative elusiveness, the verb matches the pronoun “this.” Do promises the individuals will act in a necessary way linked to the goal—it links action and goal to the shared responsibility of the team.

Sometimes the words sound so simple, yet they evoke so much and depend upon a deep moral and psychological connection.

Let’s do this epitomizes the stance of a team that commits to be present to a situation and perform the tasks necessary to achieve it. But underneath, it evokes the dedication and mutual regard and coordination any group of “us” needs.

Sports Ethics: “Step Up”

“We were down. Coach told me I had to step up my game and I did.”

How many times have we heard this expression from coaches and players: step up.

I think the notion of step up carries real weight as an ethical and psychological moment in sport and represents a model to carry into professional domains.

Think about the metaphor for a moment: step up. It places the person on a step, a place, even a plateau. The notion specifies that the athlete or professional exists at a particular level of performance on an upward climb. The level may be a plateau or it may be a lower rung, does not matter. What does matter: the metaphor urgently states that the present step/level/plateau does not suffice to achieve the goal. Staying at this level, this step, means failure.

Let’s think about some classic situations where a player or coach must step up their play. I am going to use team here but this applies as much to individuals in individual sports as team competition.

• ·      Seniors or veterans have graduated, and the younger players of the team have to step up and perform at a higher level of skill and commitment.
• 
  
• ·      The team has fallen behind in a contest, and the contest verges on getting away from the team. The player must step up and perform to bring the team back from its lethargy and gain energy and focus.
• 
  
• ·      The team possesses a lead but the other team makes their expected run. The momentum seems to be shifting, and a player has to step up and stop the run.
• 
  
• ·      Players can step up when a window exists to excel to break the game open like avoiding a tackle and finding a fourth gear or making a free throw shot with time running out.
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• ·      Players are challenged to step up when a championship or playoff or chance is on the line.

All these situations differ but carry a common denominator—the existing level of performance will not work and must change. To the point of the game, the performance must rise up from its immediate level.

Step up has two related connotations. First, it might mean that a team is playing below its normal level. The below norm can occur when a team has not prepared for the challenge opponents pose. They took an opponent for granted and must literally snap out of lethargy and step up to their normal level of play. A team might be surprised or tired and is not containing the other team’s comeback. Athletes must change their emotional and mental mind set on the spot and take the game seriously. They need to respond with integrity to the challenge before them.

Second, step up suggests that just being competent or playing at the norm, even if very high, will not work. A team might be playing hard and well, but just not good enough to win. A team may have been playing very well, but the opponent is roaring back, making a run, or they opponents take the lead. This calls for exceptional performance. Exceptional does not demand the impossible but dictates that a player pull it all together and bring the absolute maximum physical, mental and emotional presence that they are capable of at this stage in their development. 

Stepping up means bursting past a performance plateau. This exceptional moment meets the test of the moment. Often players may not know they have it in them, but they achieve it. They step up.

A player can have a career game responding to the quality of the opposition or stakes of the game. They can have a break out performance or a breakout moment—they escape a tackle at a critical moment; they sack a quarterback to end a drive; they intercept a pass; they stop a run with an exceptional block or spike; they perform an extraordinary save. Each action not only personifies a great individual action but galvanizes a team. Stepping up can be contagious, and fellow teammates take heart from the action; they bear down more and give a more attention and energy. Not only does the opponent’s run stop, but momentum shifts as teammates gather up their focus and their collective performance rises.

Players on the verge of giving up recover. Coaches who started to call plays based on minimizing a loss take heart and re-infuse their play calling with risk and energy; they coach up, not down. A team comes back from behind.

Multiple players express their commitment to each other. They cheer and encourage each other. The team as a whole steps up, and the coaches respond in kind with deeper concentration and focus upon plays or the energy they convey to players.

To step up does not mean just to try harder. The player calls upon him or herself to attend more deeply, concentrate more intently and push their body and memory more powerfully. Step up involves physical and mental rising from a baseline to a higher baseline for a moment in time. It may presage a higher level of performance in the future for the player or team, but it succeeds for a moment, that is enough.

Successful stepping up expands a person’s imagination of the player he or she can become. To step up need not be a one shot moment, but a new possibility.

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.