Football, tennis, basketball, volleyball: all sports – all team sports.

These sports require teamwork, communication, dedication, and understanding. Once you are on the field or on the court, it all becomes mental and requires focus and a positive mindset.

The positive effects of playing on a team sport are that you have your teammates to fall back on, a team to cheer you on, and cheer you up. As many coaches may say – we win together as a team and we lose together as a team.

But what about the individual perspective?

I play doubles tennis which takes a team effort on this team sport. When I am on the courts, there are times when I am not mentally positive or not mentally focused on the game itself. I also have a partner who may be able to relate to what I am explaining. Considering that this has to be a team effort, there are times when there is a domino effect – if one person is doing bad, so is the other person.

There may be times when people can also witness players going against one another or players making the same mistake that another player has made that can be considered the domino effect. You can consider the domino effect as the saying that yawns are contagious; if one person yawns, another person yawns.

In team sports, there are players with certain levels of expertise and certain levels of weaknesses and strengths – also players who get in their head or have their off days and on days that could cause a potential impact on their overall sportsmanship and performance that day, match, or game in a way that could rub off on other players as well.

In some sports, it may be known that if the whole team does well during a practice or during warm-ups then the whole team will do well on their next game or their next match. This idea is not always the case though because, just like how if one bad apple is rotten all the apples are rotten, this is similar to sports.

For example, some coaches are for punishments like if one player is late, the whole team has to do something as a punishment such as running laps or doing suicides. Also, a player may have had one or two bad plays, and after that, it could affect the rest of their overall performance at the game itself which can cause an effect on the other players and cause them to do bad as well. Another example of how the domino effect can be interpreted is how, for some people, if one person cries, another person begins to cry, or if one person is sick, another person gets sick.

This is a chain reaction, and it is very powerful and effective on people and teams. In the game Domino’s, it only takes one domino to fall down to cause all the other dominoes to fall down. To relate back to team sports, it only takes one player to mess up something that can cause a whole chain reaction to the whole team, or one player to make a great shot or a great play that can cause a whole chain reaction for the whole team.

This can be considered as the domino effect of team sports.