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Heated trade between Ostapenko and Townsend at US Open caught on digital camera
In the early rounds of the US Open, Jelena Ostapenko and Taylor Townsend have been caught in a heated trade.
- Sport scientist Amanda Visek’s analysis means that “fun” is a key factor in athletic growth, not only a cliché.
- Coco Gauff’s expertise on the US Open highlights the significance of psychological security and help from coaches and the gang.
- Focusing on the method of enchancment, moderately than solely on profitable, can result in larger long-term success and delight in sports activities.
Your early-round opponents at a tennis grand slam might be a few of your hardest.
Part of the reason being the ambiance, which this week and subsequent finds the world’s greatest within the sport standing sq. in the midst of New York City’s Arthur Ashe Stadium earlier than greater than 20,000 spectators.
But what you additionally face, particularly as a top-ranked competitor, is an adversary charged with the thrill of the problem you pose. He or she has little to lose.
US Open No. 3 seed Coco Gauff performed unseeded Ajla Tomljanovic, whom Gauff had overwhelmed in straight units on the 2024 Paris Olympics. The concept of dealing with Gauff once more, although, gave the Australian an opportunity to play at a better degree, to rise as much as the problem Gauff offered.
In different phrases, making use of the analysis of sport scientist Amanda Visek, it was a chance for enjoyable.
Gauff, a two-time grand slam winner, had endured a wave of double faults in current weeks. She had made what appeared like a drastic change by switching coaches simply days earlier than the 12 months’s ultimate main match.
And but she had related intentions.
“I’m definitely very excited,” Gauff informed ESPN earlier than she stepped onto middle court docket for the primary spherical. “Obviously, a little bit nervous, but I’m just gonna go out there and have fun.”
What Visek has discovered in finding out what makes sports activities enjoyable is that the reply is much from a cliché. Her groundbreaking “Fun Maps” research that included female and male soccer gamers of various ages and talent ranges in 2015, discovered it to be a state of being that goes hand in hand with athletic growth.
What Gauff found over three troublesome units in opposition to Tomljanovic, and two nights later in her excruciating win over Croatia’s Donna Vekic within the second spherical, is on the essence of Visek’s newest revealed paper finding out enjoyable determinants in tennis.
It’s Visek’s first research about a person sport, and it confirms what she has discovered about sport after sport.
“It’s actually simpler than we might think,” says Visek, an affiliate professor at The George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health in Washington. “It’s not, ‘What makes it fun for Steve is different than from Amanda,’ and then you’ve got to jump through all these hoops to make it an individualized experience unique to him or her.
“Not at all. Instead, there’s very common elements across the experience fundamental to quality sport participation athletes describe as fun.”
Fun, Visek says, doesn’t simply occur while you drop your child off at follow or a sport, or get out of a participant shuttle on the US Open.
Organizations, coaches, dad and mom and athletes can design for it and, maybe like Gauff, notice it after they least count on it.
What does having ‘enjoyable’ imply in tennis, and in all sports activities?
Visek’s unique research, “The Fun Integration Theory”, requested youth soccer gamers (ages 8 to 19) from across the Washington, D.C., metropolitan space what made their sport enjoyable. From their responses, 81 enjoyable determinants have been recognized, which the analysis staff listed on playing cards they gave to the gamers to type and price in significance.
Based on how the playing cards have been sorted, the determinants have been grouped into 11 dimensions of enjoyable (enjoyable components) and graphically offered on a map.
She has repeated the research design with basketball and ice hockey gamers in Sweden (84 enjoyable determinants) and now tennis (120 determinants).
The outcomes reveal a lot of the identical about what we discover enjoyable about sports activities, whether or not we’re male or feminine, contemplate ourselves elite or leisure gamers, or are younger children or younger adults.
Visek’s research of enjoyable determinants in tennis included 667 female and male junior tennis gamers (aged 6-19) from the mid-Atlantic and Southeastern areas of the United States. They have been represented throughout racial identities and talent ranges and recruited from a broad array of tennis amenities and packages.
Of all of the research Visek has performed up to now, they recognized essentially the most enjoyable determinants but, all the pieces from coaches who assist gamers be taught and problem them; to coaches who care about their progress; to maintaining optimistic vitality to persevere by way of setbacks. There are so many determinants that make the expertise enjoyable.
Of main significance in tennis have been enjoyable components that included determinants of “Match Play,” “Positive Coaching,” “Working Hard & Learning,” “Developing Mental Strength,” “Staying Active,” “Sportsmanship” and “Training with a Coach.”
Note the repeated word “Coach.”
“Having a coach who cares and checks in on players’ mental health matters as much as learning the perfect backhand and hitting a clean, smooth shot!” she writes on social media about the tennis study.
Athletes, even Coco Gauff, want to feel it’s safe to make mistakes
Gavin MacMillan, Gauff’s new coach, was obsessed with sports as a boy in Toronto. He says his father pushed him away from hockey, his favorite one, when he was about 16, by sending him to a tennis academy.
“It was a horrifying experience,” MacMillan told Performance-Plus Tennis in an interview. “It was super humbling … And after I got done playing college, I really started trying to understand what I had failed at and why, what I could have done differently.”
He intricately studied the power serves of Pete Sampras and others. He found similarities in the way Sampras served with the way quarterbacks threw, as well as pitchers who could hit 100 mph with their fastballs. There was an internal rotation of the throwing arm, he noticed, while the other arm created torque in the spine.
He realized he may train by comparability, but additionally with an understanding of how troublesome the duty was. He had lived it.
MacMillan helped world No. 1 and defending US Open champion Aryna Sabalenka rebuild her serve. What we’ve seen in simply over every week of working with Gauff is his human contact.
ESPN reporter Kris Budden, who observed him for 40 minutes on a practice court a few hours before Gauff’s opening match in New York, described a hands-off approach. Budden said the discussion was positive but minimal.
“The only thing that I saw him work on with the serve was some foot placement, but other than that has been very complimentary, visibly applauding her for her serves,” Budden said on air.
Look at the No. 1 most important fun determinant in Visek’s tennis study: A coach that is easy to learn from to help master my skills.
Here are some others that relate to it:
- A coach that cares about my progress (3)
- A coach that motivates and encourages me when I am doing poorly (8)
- Knowing it is okay to make mistakes and fail (45)
- A coach that congratulates me when I hit a nice shot (48)
- People cheering after I make a good shot (91)
“It very clearly shows the role of psychological safety,” Visek says. “Across all the studies, the athletes have said, ‘I like learning from mistakes. That makes it fun. I love the opportunity to get coached and get corrected and the opportunity to try again.’
“The opportunity to learn, to improve, to make mistakes, to learn from those mistakes, in a very safe environment, makes it a fun experience versus a threatening experience with abusive coaching.”
When Gauff hit a big shot during the US Open’s first two rounds, MacMillan was on his feet, clapping and cheering along with Gauff’s mother, Candi. But he also encouraged her when she double-faulted.
Here, there was a feeling of responsibility to not let the other down, but also that their partnership would come with ups and downs.
COACH STEVE: 3 steps for dealing with a ‘bad coach’
Building mental strength and finding a social connection is part of the fun
The double faults were mounting for Gauff and Vekic late in the first set. Gauff, who was remaking a crucial part of her game on the fly, wore her duress more acutely.
As ESPN cameras switched to her sitting in her courtside chair, she was shaking. She clutched a towel to her face and cried.
“You want her to be happy,” analyst Mary Joe Fernandez said. “You want her to be enjoying the competition, the challenge.”
Play stopped when Vekic led 6-5, and she received medical treatment on her arm. Gauff practiced serves. She looked into the crowd and saw Simone Biles being interviewed.
She thought about how the most decorated gymnast in the world had removed herself from the 2020 Games when she developed ‘the twisties’. Biles returned to the Paris Olympics to win three gold medals.
“She helped me pull it out,” Gauff said. “I was just thinking if she can go on a six-inch beam and do that with all the pressures of the world, then I can hit the ball. It brought me a little bit of calm, just knowing her story with all the things she went through mentally.”
It was a reminder, as Visek’s latest study lays out, that tennis is a shared human experience. You share it intimately with the opponent who pushes you to play better, but also with the people who support you.
“People tend to think and talk about tennis as an ‘individual sport,’ ” Visek says, “and I think one of the things that’s really cool that came through the results of the study is if you look across all 120 determinants, very clearly there is a relational and social connection component to the experience that is fundamental to having fun.”
Gauff heard the crowd, which included her mother and coach, get behind her, and she found herself up for the challenge.
She pulled out the first set in a tiebreaker and pulled away in the second, firing some of her hardest and most accurate serves of the tournament to close out the match 7-6 (7-5), 6-2.
“You guys really helped me a lot so I’m doing this for myself but I’m also doing it for you,” she told the crowd, “and no matter how tough it gets inside, you can do it.”
Minutes later, sitting with ESPN’s Fernandez and Chris McKendry, she said: “It was an emotional match for me, but I think this is something I can relate on for the rest of my career and that feeling that I felt, because I never felt like that on the court before.”
She was still frustrated by her serve but drew strength from her ground game.
That feeling of “hitting a clean, smooth shot” – the way Gauff felt with a lot of her forehands – ranked No. 15 on the long list of fun determinants in Visek’s study.
“Developing physical and mental strength,” which she needed to execute them, ranked two spots ahead of it.
“There’s been some matches where I feel like mentally, I didn’t put my best foot forward and those losses hurt more than anything,” Gauff said. “It’s like, ‘What if I just settled down or what if I just tried not to give up on myself?’ So today, even when the moments got tough, and it looked like I wasn’t there, I was there. It was just trying to find it.
“I just try to get my best mental effort. In the physical part, you can’t control how you showed up, but the mental part I can. So every day I just try to put that on the court and then when I go home, I can say I left it all out there.”
Coach Steve: Finding ‘balance’ with Biles wasn’t always easy, longtime coach reveals
Focusing on winning alone is secondary; focusing on the process of winning makes more of it possible
Gauff, 21, is known for looking fashionable as she plays.
“Before we go,” McKendry said at the end of the interview, “can I simply see your nails? Can we finish on one thing enjoyable?”
It seems although, with what she had simply undergone, Gauff already had enjoyable, not less than by the top of the match.
“I think I just showed people what it’s like to be a human and I have bad days, but I think it’s more about how you get up after those bad moments and how you show up after that,” she stated. “And I think today I showed that I can get up after feeling the worst I’ve ever felt on the court.”
Look on the prime enjoyable determinants amongst tennis gamers, in keeping with Visek’s research:
- A coach that’s straightforward to be taught from to assist grasp my abilities
- Trying my greatest by giving full effort
- A coach that cares about my progress
- High and optimistic vitality throughout follow
- Being inspired to strive onerous and play my greatest
- Not giving up and persevering from setbacks
Here are the highest 25, as revealed within the International Journal of Sports Science and Coaching:
Similar to Visek’s earlier research, profitable falls additional down the checklist. Winning a match is No. 49, profitable a match No. 50 and profitable a set No. 52. However, “winning against someone I have lost to before,” is rated excessive at No. 11.
Gauff had fallen to Vekic on the Paris Olympics.
“Winning itself, it’s the singular outcome of a competitive experience,” Visek says. “And when you’re playing an opponent, you don’t have entire control over whether you win or lose a match.
“The focus of playing should really be on the process rather than the outcome. If you focus on the process, you make more possible the outcome of winning. The research is really clear here – fun is the accumulation of moment-to-moment experiences that challenge us, that make us better.”
Gauff stated this week she’s “obsessed with the process of getting better.” She appears to be like at her hiring of MacMillan as one that may carry her extra long-term success, even when she doesn’t increase this 12 months’s US Open trophy.
Here is a scientific clarification of Gauff’s pursuit:
“If you want to win more,” Visek says, “perhaps it is advisable make it extra enjoyable.”
Steve Borelli, aka Coach Steve, has been an editor and writer with USA TODAY since 1999. He spent 10 years coaching his two sons’ baseball and basketball teams. He and his wife, Colleen, are now sports parents for two high schoolers. His column is posted weekly. For his past columns, click here.
Got a query for Coach Steve you need answered in a column? Email him at [email protected]
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