- Sport scientist Amanda Visek’s research suggests that ‘fun’ is a key element in athletic development, not just a cliché.
- Coco Gauff’s experience at the US Open highlights the importance of psychological safety and support from coaches and the crowd.
- Focusing on the process of improvement, rather than solely on winning, can lead to greater long-term success and enjoyment in sports.
Your early-round opponents at a tennis grand slam can be some of your toughest.
Part of the reason is the atmosphere, which this week and next finds the world’s best in the sport standing square in the middle of New York City’s Arthur Ashe Stadium before more than 20,000 spectators.
But what you also face, especially as a top-ranked competitor, is an adversary charged with the excitement of the challenge you pose. He or she has little to lose.
US Open No. 3 seed Coco Gauff played unseeded Ajla Tomljanovic, whom Gauff had beaten in straight sets at the 2024 Paris Olympics. The idea of facing Gauff again, though, gave the Australian a chance to play at a higher level, to rise up to the challenge Gauff presented.
In other words, applying the research of sport scientist Amanda Visek, it was an opportunity for fun.
Gauff, a two-time grand slam winner, had endured a wave of double faults in recent weeks. She had made what seemed like a drastic change by switching coaches just days before the year’s final major tournament.
And yet she had similar intentions.
“I’m definitely very excited,” Gauff told ESPN before she stepped onto center court for the first round. “Obviously, a little bit nervous, but I’m just gonna go out there and have fun.”
What Visek has learned in studying what makes sports fun is that the answer is far from a cliché. Her groundbreaking “Fun Maps” study that included male and female soccer players of varying ages and skill levels in 2015, found it to be a state of being that goes hand in hand with athletic development.
What Gauff discovered over three difficult sets against Tomljanovic, and two nights later in her excruciating win over Croatia’s Donna Vekic in the second round, is at the essence of Visek’s latest published paper studying fun determinants in tennis.
It’s Visek’s first study about an individual sport, and it confirms what she has learned about sport after sport.
‘It’s actually simpler than we might think,’ says Visek, an associate 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 just happen when you drop your kid off at practice or a game, or get out of a player shuttle at the US Open.
Organizations, coaches, parents and athletes can design for it and, perhaps like Gauff, realize it when they least expect it.
What does having ‘fun’ mean in tennis, and in all sports?
Visek’s original study, “The Fun Integration Theory”, asked youth soccer players (ages 8 to 19) from around the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area what made their sport fun. From their responses, 81 fun determinants were identified, which the research team listed on cards they gave to the players to sort and rate in importance.
Based on how the cards were sorted, the determinants were grouped into 11 dimensions of fun (fun factors) and graphically presented on a map.
She has repeated the study design with basketball and ice hockey players in Sweden (84 fun determinants) and now tennis (120 determinants).
The results reveal much of the same about what we find fun about sports, whether we are male or female, consider ourselves elite or recreational players, or are young kids or young adults.
Visek’s study of fun determinants in tennis included 667 male and female junior tennis players (aged 6-19) from the mid-Atlantic and Southeastern areas of the United States. They were represented across racial identities and skill levels and recruited from a broad array of tennis facilities and programs.
Of all the studies Visek has conducted so far, they identified the most fun determinants yet, everything from coaches who help players learn and challenge them; to coaches who care about their progress; to keeping positive energy to persevere through setbacks. There are so many determinants that make the experience fun.
Of primary importance in tennis were fun factors 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 could teach by comparison, but also with an understanding of how difficult the task was. He had lived it.
MacMillan helped world No. 1 and defending US Open champion Aryna Sabalenka rebuild her serve. What we have seen in just over a week of working with Gauff is his human touch.
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.”
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 just see your nails? Can we end on something fun?”
It turns out though, with what she had just undergone, Gauff already had fun, at least by the end 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 said. “And I think today I showed that I can get up after feeling the worst I’ve ever felt on the court.”
Look at the top fun determinants among tennis players, according to Visek’s study:
- A coach that is easy to learn from to help master my skills
- Trying my best by giving full effort
- A coach that cares about my progress
- High and positive energy during practice
- Being encouraged to try hard and play my best
- Not giving up and persevering from setbacks
Here are the top 25, as published in the International Journal of Sports Science and Coaching:
Similar to Visek’s previous studies, winning falls further down the list. Winning a match is No. 49, winning a tournament No. 50 and winning a set No. 52. However, “winning against someone I have lost to before,” is rated high at No. 11.
Gauff had fallen to Vekic at 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 said this week she’s “obsessed with the process of getting better.” She looks at her hiring of MacMillan as one that will bring her more long-term success, even if she doesn’t raise this year’s US Open trophy. She has now reached the fourth round.
Here is a scientific explanation of Gauff’s pursuit:
“If you want to win more,” Visek says, “maybe you need to make it more fun.’
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.