Playing Tennis with your Head

Today I excerpt from Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World Class Performers from Everybody Else by Geoffrey Colvin. Specifically, the excerpt is about how top-ranked tennis players manage to return very fast serves, but it also serves as an example to show that world class performers' edge is not down to innate talent as much as it is to their hard-won ability to anticipate.

"A top-ranked male tennis player will serve the ball at speeds approaching and occasionally exceeding 150 mph. (Andy Roddick seems to hold the record in competition, 155 mph.) At that speed, the ball will travel from the server's racket to the opponent's service line in just over a quarter of a second. Most of us, facing such a serve, would have a hard time turning our heads fast enough to watch it shoot past us. Yet top players routinely return those serves. The conclusion we tend to draw is that top players have incredible reaction times, enabling them to watch that ball come at them and get themselves in proper position in a quarter of a second.

"Top professionals do indeed have very fast reaction times, and reaction speed can be improved with practice, so professionals work on it. The problem is that improvements in reaction speed follow what scientists call a power law (because there's an exponent in the formula) and what hte rest of us call the 80-20 rule. That is, nearly all the improvement comes in the first little bit of training. After that, lots more practice yields only a little additional improvement. Top tennis pros have all pushed themselves to the point where it's tough to achieve any more reaction speed. The very best, however, have found a way to get around that limitation.

"Researchers showed tennis players films of opponents serving at them, and use sophisticated equipment to track precisely their eye movements. Average players focused on the ball. But in the brief period between the start of the serving motion and the moment when the racket hits the ball...the best players weren't looking at the ball. They were looking at the opponent's hips, shoulders, and arms, which foretold where they would hit the ball. The researchers then stopped the film at the moment of contact and asked the test subjects where the serve was going to go. The average players, being focused on the ball, had no idea. But the best players knew, and as a result, they could start positioning themselves to return the serve even before the serve was hit. By the time the ball landed, they were already there.

"They had found a way to react faster without improving their reaction time. Researchers have uncovered the same phenomenon in many kinds of sports and in a wide range of other activities. Top performers can figure out what's going to happen sooner than average performers by seeing more."

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