I’m enjoying this year’s US Open tennis. The athletes making it through the tournament are winning with skill, and winning with endurance. The men’s matches take a different shape when it goes to the fourth and fifth sets. The women’s matches don’t have the same in-game pattern as the men, but you see the endurance plus skill athletic composite (skill endurance) as the games pile up for the winners who advance.
In both tournaments player tactics meet their fitness/recovery plans meet their skill/talent sets in a sports science experiment that is unique to each individual tennis athlete. The best players, the ones with high rankings from previous Grand Slam success, benefit from knowledge gained from their past experiments in earlier Slams. Emerging players evolve their games in the non-Slams, knowing that the best players will hold back in order to peak for Slams. The list of quality newcomers and old guard elites, all potential winners, is long and diverse, and the matches have been great to watch.
Meantime over in Spain at the basketball World Cup Kenneth Faried has used his skill endurance to establish himself as one of the best players on the star-studded USA Basketball roster. The US team is headed toward a showdown championship game against Spain who have their own All-Stars– Pau Gasol, Marc Gasol and Serge Ibaka, all of whom will match up against Faried, and all of whom are taller and more skilled than Faried.
The point to make about skill endurance is that, as tennis shows, when matchups become tests of endurance and will, central nervous system fatigue inevitably reduces skills that have a cognitive component. The five-set wins by US Open men’s 10th seed Kei Nishikori over higher seeds, Raonic and Wawrinka, to get to the semi-finals were instances where fatigue neutralized the higher seeds’ skill weapons.
The World Cup basketball is, I think, more compelling because the Faried matchups are set within a larger 5-on-5 team context, and because USA Basketball does not have the underdog label that Nishikori has. If USA Basketball bets on Faried to create an advantage against big, skilled Spain, it is risky and might not materialize until late in the game, when the competitive drama will be off the charts.
If skill endurance is an emerging source of competitive advantage in tennis, basketball and football (with its accelerating pace of play), soccer is the sport that established the tactic. And soccer may where teams have the most to gain from honing it. Witness how much drama occurs during the last 20 minutes of each 90 minute fixture.
Developing players with soccer skill endurance also seems one reason why it is so difficult for the best teenage talent to make the leap to become elite professionals. The best young players show up with athletic skills to get their spot, then add endurance to keep it, and then get to find out if elite-level skill endurance is in the cards. The essence of sports science is to navigate talent through the progression and minimize overuse and injury risk during development.
Steve Magness, distance running coach at the University of Houston, blogged an essay in July about Soccer as the Battle between Endurance and Speed. He pointed out that the conditioning coaches often mistakenly rely on high-intensity interval training to develop endurance, something that comes from strength-training practice as a way to develop long-duration fitness without having athletes experience muscle adaptions that compromise power and speed. Magness’ insight is that producing both speed and endurance comes from working both, in the proper balance, writing “for endurance athletes, most of the time it isn’t that the endurance work erodes all of our speed, it’s that we didn’t do enough to maintain the speed. We didn’t keep it.”
Jurgen Klinsmann said that his goal for the US Mens National Team in the next soccer World Cup is the semi-finals(video autoplays, pre-roll + 1:17). The only way he could declare something so audacious is if he is confident that the player development process will discover and develop the skill endurance in athletes who are not currently elite but who will be in less than four years time. And the way USMNT emphasizes endurance seems like it is on track to being reliable, albeit under-recognized, pathway to developing elite soccer skill endurance.
Back to tennis, William Rhoden at The New York Times wrote that American college tennis programs will try to become the pipeline for future US elite tennis talent development. Today’s skill endurance tennis game favors a 24-year old more than a 20-year old, and college is a good place to fill out those years instead of the bottom rungs of the pro tour. The college sports career decision is, to my mind, as much a bet on the emerging quality of sports science at top university athletic programs taking root on a broader scale than would be possible at the USTA. Done right the collegiate pipeline will have lots of competing schools working to out innovate each other, and leading to a range of pathways for talent to realize world-class potential.