The day was classic early April: cool and windy over central Illinois fields. From the tennis courts at Normal Community West High School, I could see traffic thundering north and south on I-55, fleeing Normal, IL at 70 mph. I wanted nothing more than to flag one down, hop aboard, and get out of town as fast as I could.
None of this was supposed to be happening. My high school doubles partner and I were the no. 1 seed in the tournament. Last year at this same event, we had won our flight easily, dropping only three games. True, we had moved up a flight this year, but that didn’t matter: we were better than all the other teams there. Our coaches knew it. We knew it.
But that morning, nothing was going right. The Metamora team across the net hadn’t gotten the memo that they had no business competing. Instead, they were playing their hearts out. My partner and I were frozen in amber: everything was happening too fast for us. Our returns sailed out. We didn’t move our feet. Second serves wound up in the net. With every mistake, the match slipped farther and farther away, and my nerves jangled more sharply.
As we lost the first set 1-6 and walked glumly to the changeover, everything in my body was tight. It felt like there was a rack of weights sitting on my chest. Forget about trying to make a good decision, or even hitting a good shot—I was struggling to breathe evenly. “Oh,” I thought distantly to myself, “so this is why they call it choking.”
Choking has a strange status in sports. Nearly all athletes deny during, or after, a contest, that they ever felt any nerves or pressure at all, something that anyone who has been in a stressful situation knows is an outright lie. Maybe there are a few people in the world who, when faced with pressure, are able to shrug it off easily and focus solely on the task at hand without their pulse fluttering. They’re like Spock from Star Trek: coolly present in the moment, sober and decisive as they perform their function.
If those people exist, I envy them. I’m sure they’re exceedingly rare, and I’m also sure I’ve never met one. Don’t get me wrong: I’ve seen plenty of junior and adult players excel in big-pressure moments. But not for one second did I believe they weren’t nervous.
As athletes though, we don’t like to admit we’re nervous while we’re competing. We know we’re not supposed to be nervous; we’re supposed to be executing our game plans. If you’re nervous under pressure, you’re soft; you’re weak. We don’t like to acknowledge it could happen to—or is happening RIGHT NOW—to us. We talk around it, with euphemisms like “a little tight” or “settle down” or “relax.” But they all mean the same thing: you’re that ultimate blackmark, a choker. The word itself is so violent: choked. You wilted out there, it says. You died.
Having quite literally choked nearly to death on numerous occasions (it’s a fun story, ask me about it), I can tell you there is a grain of truth to using “choking” in a sports context. When you can’t breathe, the mind disappears. All that’s left is the body’s instinct, and that instinct is panic. I once choked on a piece of chicken in an empty house. In a haze, I leapt up from my chair and ran a lap around the inside of the house as I struggled to throw up (sorry for that image) and breathe again. There was no thought in my mind that said, “you should sprint around the house as you do this.” In fact, it probably wasn’t a very helpful thing to do! But my mind was gone. I was operating on autopilot: a huge surge of adrenaline that took away all my thoughts and emotions.
That same sort of blind panic is what we mean when we talk about choking: overwhelmed by the moment and shot through on adrenaline, our brains shut down. We’re left frozen, unsure of what to do or how we should do it. In that Metamora doubles match, my coach told me on a changeover I wasn’t crossing at the net to take volleys on my partner’s serve. My honest to God reaction in the moment internally was that I didn’t know how to do that. It didn’t matter that we had spent weeks drilling that exact skill in practice: I was too overwhelmed to process that. Goodbye, higher cognitive function. It was good to know you.
Yet for all that, I think we treat choking the wrong way in sports by making it a forbidden word. Everybody gets nervous. Even the pros have to find ways to control their nerves. Hope Solo, a 16-year veteran goalkeeper for the U.S. women’s soccer team, wrote in 2019 that she was always nervous before big games. And of course she was! As she writes, “[N]erves meant that I cared. To win the World Cup, you have to care. So, you have to be nervous.”
It’s the same thing in tennis. When you watch the greatest players in the world struggling to close out matches the same way you do in high school tennis, there’s a reason for that: they’re under the same pressure you are. Think of Roger Federer at Wimbledon 2019, barely hitting out on the ball in his match points against Novak Djokovic. Think of Serena Williams in 2015, suddenly unable to find the court in her U.S. Open semifinal against heavy underdog Roberta Vinci. Those players, two of the best to ever play our game, choked.
Dr. Allen Fox, a former high-ranking professional player and coach of Pepperdine University, says it perfectly: “Everybody chokes.” And Fox offers this advice: when you’re choking, don’t take it personally. Being nervous and missing shots isn’t what causes players to lose. What causes players to lose is getting rattled by the choking. “I’m a loser,” they think. “I’m weak. Everything people said about me was right.” Suddenly they’ve missed twice as many balls, and now they’re in real trouble.
Instead, accept the “choked” point as you would any other error: a missed forehand or shanked second serve. We accept that these misses will occur during a match. We don’t like it, but we also know that we will bounce back quickly on the next point. The same should go for when you feel you’re choking. Don’t panic, but accept it and move on.
“Okay, great Kirk,” you say to yourself. “But easier said than done.”
Good point, hypothetical reader. Here are some ways to do that when you feel yourself start to choke:
1) Before everything else, breathe. Pressure and nerves rob us of our ability to breathe freely and relax. Taking a few deep breaths before a point goes a long way toward stabilizing yourself. Once you’re breathing, you can move on to:
2) Focus on short-term thoughts instead of larger outcomes. In other words, focus on the point at hand, and the shots you’re hitting. Your thoughts shouldn’t be more than two seconds in the future. Watch the ball. Focus on a game plan and stick with it. “Hit everything to his backhand” is a great game plan: it’s short-term, and has nothing to do with whether you’re winning or losing the match.
3) Trust yourself. Probably the hardest one, but an important final step. Know that you’re capable of the game plan you select. Be confident enough to yourself to stay focused on what you need to do in order to play well—again, that’s “play well,” not “win.” The more experience you have in matches and pressure situations, the deeper of a well you have to draw on here. “I’ve done it before, so I know I can do it again” is a real phenomenon. It’s why as coaches we try to involve as much competition and pressure in practice as possible.
In the parlance of policing and the military, this whole process is called “Breathe—evaluate—make a call.” First relax, consider your options, then decide on something short-term and focus on that. It’s the same for sports.
I think we do ourselves a disservice as coaches and athletes when we act like choking is abnormal, or a character defect. Personally, I would always rather a player fighting and struggling with nerves than watch a player just decide they have no chance in a match and give up. One of those two players is going to get better, and it’s going to be the one who committed the “ultimate sin” of choking.
Players need to know choking is a part of sports, and indeed of life. Our focus should be on “what to do when you choke” instead of “how not to choke.” The latter is just unrealistic, but competing while you’re nervous—while it feels like you can’t breathe—is what makes athletes great. That’s true at the junior level all the way up to the pros.
My doubles partner and I did win that match, and we did it with the formula above: focusing on simple aspects of tennis. Instead of focusing on winning, we focused on good doubles: making a serve or a return, hitting a good volley. We won the next two sets easily.
Then we went to the finals and dropped the first set 1-6 again. We won that match too, but I think it’s important for players to know conquering nerves isn’t a one-time battle. It’s something that has to happen in every close situation, and that’s okay. So don’t be afraid, even when—especially when—you’re choking. It’s just part of the game. Instead, breathe, evaluate, and make a short-term focused call. Pressure comes and goes in waves. Before you know it, it might be past you.
Sources
Dr. Allen Fox, "Choking in Tennis." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OoljK0HgFc
Hope Solo, "If you're not nervous at a World Cup, you don't care enough to win." https://www.theguardian.com/football/2019/jun/10/hope-solo-world-cup-soccer-uswnt-nerves
