Guys, I think I just solved choking.

The Origin

It’s a hot, mid-April afternoon in Merced, California. My doubles partner and lifelong best friend are playing high school doubles. The winner goes to sectionals. We’re up 5-2 against two of Merced High’s best doubles players. But our lead starts slipping. Our double break advantage teeters to one. We keep reassuring each other, “it’s ok,” “you got this,” “next one, champ.” Every point — win or lose — we give each other high fives. All the while, the opposing team’s bench cheers at every victory by their compatriots. We begin double faulting; we lose the second set in a tiebreaker ; and eventually the 3rd set tiebreaker, too.

Ever since that day I’ve been obsessed with the psychological concept of choking. Why is it that at the end of a competition, some of us start performing at our worst ? Are we scared of winning? Do we not feel as though we deserve to win? 

While I don’t think I hit the psychoanalytical kernel of choking in this article, I propose, from a behaviorist standpoint, the following: that choking is a learned behavior arising from positively reinforcing both winning and losing, equally. Prior to and during the match, the behavior you don’t want happening (losing points) is positively reinforced just as much as the behavior you want to encourage (winning points). By indiscriminately praising both success and failure, athletes lose the incentive to win, because either result amounts to the same “praise” reward. 

In the tennis match with my friend and me, we gave positive reinforcement to each other every time the point ended. It didn’t matter if we won or lost the point: without judgment we embraced each other, as if double faulting were commendable! But in competition, the purpose isn’t just to play points aimlessly; the point is to win. So why were we taught by our youth tennis coach to encourage each other’s— failures !

Youth sport coaches dispense praise indiscriminately as a sales tactic to keep your children invested in the sport. In youth sports, the coaches aren’t trying to develop “winners;” they’re trying to make a buck teaching tennis, or soccer, or basketball. That’s why coaches unwittingly encourage any act of playing the sport, independent of whether that act is tendentious to winning. So long as your daughter is kicking the soccer ball and buying juice pouches, the coach will bestow her with praise. The indiscriminate praise of acts tending towards both success and failure is a sales tactic intended to retain your kid in youth sports for as long as possible.

And naturally, children (such as my partner and me) assimilate this habit of indiscriminate praise, and believe it to be synonymous with sportsmanship: if you don’t praise every shot, you’re committing some fictitious gaming-etiquette faux paw — as if one missed shot is some sort of crime against your partner or your team that it requires verbal reassurance against exclusion from the pack. 

This retention tactic by youth sport coaches is the breeding ground for choking, as it encourages children to defer winning. The retention tactic teaches children that the point of sport is not about winning (as winning ends the game), but rather about sustained, aimless, endless play. This is all part of the youth sports business model: the more “engaged” you are in the sport, the less likely you are to cry to mommy and complain you’re bored. But, again, sport isn’t about parity and play aimed towards mindless occupation — it’s about winning.  Hence the (perhaps sad) inference that the desire to win subtly implies a desire to stop play. In short, indiscriminate praise perversely shifts the focus of sport from winning to aimless (yet prolonged) play. 

The Proposal

So what discipline do we need before and during a match to refocus the aim onto winning? Change nothing when your teammates win a point , or make a basket, or complete a catch: give them a high five, a “let’s go,” fistbump, handshake. If your teammate errs and loses the point, however, say and do nothing. Don’t get mad and start pointing fingers (don’t even think such a thing); rather, just give no reaction at all, as if the error were some foreign language. Hold all celebration in abeyance until you actually win. 

You need to train your brain to treat errors as something alien or incommensurate to your life. Think of errors like you would ultraviolet light or micro-waves: it’s there around you, but it’s invisible and doesn’t affect your day-to-day. Or you can perceive errors as an inevitable result caused by Fate (and how can you hold someone responsible if they had no choice in the matter). I can visualize the idea I’m describing as a man babbling to a German Shepherd, and the German Shepherd cutely and inquisitively turns his head to the side — but has no idea what you’re saying. However way you’d like to think it, both consternation and gushing praise need to be extricated from error. The only consequence to erring is the utter lack of consequence. 

Moreover, holding celebration in abeyance after erring curbs the impulse to rage. Everyone’s seen a tennis player become irate and smash a racket out of frustration after losing a series of points. Rather than focusing on one’s errors, my framework asks players to focus on omitting an emotional consequence altogether, and focus on receiving your teammates’ (or your own) future praise. The focus is less on the errors that happened in the past, and more about the future reward for winning play. Not only does holding celebration in abeyance re-wire the brain to embrace winning, it also helps curb anger. 

My framework also assumes you’re not a dick. Just because your teammate may err doesn’t devalue them as a person. It’s too extreme of a leap to allow the withdrawal of praise to imply exclusion from the pack. I think it’s actually imperative that the withdrawal singularly motivates one towards future praise, as opposed to implying anger or contempt. You need to reassure your partner or team prior to competition that y’all are unconditionally one unit, and that multiple errors from an individual component doesn’t change that fact. Someone insecure about whether their teammates will still be friends with them after the match is probably not properly motivated to play for the team…

Conclusion

Decades after this monstrous choke job by my doubles partner and me, I’ve been haunted by an existential question: “what’s the point of winning?” I’ve wrestled this question in a multitude of ways. Perhaps the point of winning is to disprove the presumption that I am endowed with the quality of being a choker. Another motive to win may be because those that win, tend to win more (meaning if I win this particular game, it is more likely I will win the next). Or maybe the question is wholesale defective, since winning militates against my egalitarian principles. But I think I’ve found the conclusive answer to this infernal question: I should win because I want to garner the praise of my teammates. I’m not competing because I want to win; I’m competing because winning garners praise, and I highly value that praise. And the admiration and respect of my teammates — isn’t that the whole point of sport ?