Does improvement ruin fun?
Age-defying Athletes discover a trade-off between sports performance improvement and good old-fashioned fun
As men and women “of a certain age” climb the sport skill ladder, are they charged a toll of enjoyment? Does more performance dictate less fun?
In The Elixir of Sport, Nelli, a 43-year-old1 tennis player, went from being a rookie to a serious competitor who plays “…almost every day…main form of exercise, local league and two USTA teams.”
But rapid skill acquisition is a mixed blessing: “As I have reached more advanced levels with more competition,” Nelli reports, “I miss my happy-go-lucky tennis. Advancing rapidly, as I have, is very satisfying, but there is more player drama [within teams at higher rankings] such as people already jumping from one team to another for next season. There’s a price to play at these more advanced levels.”
When considering the goal she has for her sport, Nelli opines that she’s “…weighing where I want to sit with tennis. Trade-off being strong player vs. camaraderie...enjoyment vs. being good.”
Juanita, 64, a golfer, expressed this dilemma in a more ambivalent way.
This retired executive has worked all over the world and achieved career success. She is also a polysport (playing both golf and tennis) who started on the links almost 35 years ago.
Now retired, Juanita is a very capable golfer. But she finds herself at an imbalance between the desire to have fun and the need to be challenged. Basically, she seeks the state of “Flow” in golf but finds that it escapes her.
“I try to have fun. I would like to get to a place where I don’t care [about my golf performance],” laments Juanita.
“People who can laugh at themselves have more fun, even if they aren’t as good. But what is the point of not being good?” she wonders.
“Can’t have ups and downs [in golf]. When I tried not to care about ups and downs, I didn’t have fun because I couldn’t remember my good shots.”
Juanita claims that “Tennis is more consistent. I can play tennis and shut down my brain without ruining my game.”
It’s a confounding marinade, say pickleballers.
The May 2 edition of pickleball e-newsletter The Dink addressed this issue of skill v. enjoyment. “It’s complicated” was the summary of conversations with players on both sides of the argument. In quoting one interviewee, the article concluded with: “Fun is about your relationship with the sport, not your skill or experience.” Hard to argue with that.
WIIFY?
As described in Elixir, Age-defying Athletes’ satisfaction with their games reflects a brew of several ingredients:
Skill. Certainly, skill contributes to satisfaction. But the satisfaction may emanate from the player’s perception of an upward (i.e., improving) skill trajectory, within the context of good and bad days.
Frequency. The more an Age-defying Athlete plays, the better he/she becomes (again, on that trend line), and the better he/she becomes, the more satisfied the player is with the game.
Format. Personality does enter the picture. Introverts appear happier with individual sports such as running and swimming, whereas the more gregarious types gravitate toward racquet sports and other team competitions.
Consistency. Golfers suffer more than any other type of Age-defying Athlete. Juanita’s remarks certainly ring true in terms of this characteristic. This doesn’t mean that golfers cannot enjoy both fun and improvement. Rather, it means that linksmen and -women feel all bad hits are their fault – what a tennis player might characterize as an unforced error. Balls drowning in water or suffocating in sand have no mitigating factors. Or, put another way, if you’re thinking of adopting golf, how much frustration can you handle!?!
Competition. As they have evolved, each older gender has taken on competitive characteristics more akin to their opposite younger personas. That is, women are more comfortable being competitive, while men have dropped the need to go all-out when playing.
Friends. To this list should be added camaraderie. Whether you’re frustrated by golf or thriving at swimming, do you have a coterie of Age-defying Athletes who feel similarly? Comrades are intensely influential in sport satisfaction – whether skill is going up, down, sideways, or around and around.
The skill v. enjoyment trade-off need not impact your play if you come to grips with goals for your game. If fun is your priority, but you’re missing it, sort through frequency, format, competition, etc., from the above list, and determine if one of these needs tweaking. Similarly for performance.
Play the long game, and make the trade-offs you need in order to achieve that.
Nelli belongs to the “Not 50 but still nifty” cohort of the Age-defying Athletes Project (ADAP) community. To earn a full ADAP entry, men and women must be older than the entirely-arbitrarily set cut-off of 50 years.