ETHS teams have won a total of 36 state championships across ten different sports. Of those 36, only two of them were in team sports; the vast majority were in individual sports like track and field, swimming, and gymnastics.
Although no two sports are the same, both the pressure and the glory are usually experienced differently in individual vs. team sports. For example, when athletes make a mistake in a team sport, they let their whole team down, but in an individual sport they only hurt their own chances of winning. Similarly, when someone makes a game-winning play in a team sport, they help their team win, whereas a win in an individual sport brings only personal glory.
The type of sports athletes play and excel at often depend on which type of achievement they find more rewarding, and which kind of pressure they feel is personally easier to manage.
“You cannot rely on another member of the team to fix your mistake, if you mess up, that’s on you, and it hurts you more than the whole,” said track and cross country runner Andrew Praeuner.
Individual sports such as running are unique in this way. If runners make a mistake, it won’t hurt anyone else, and it’s on the athlete to get back on track.
Owen Keyser, a sophomore who plays both tennis and hockey for ETHS, finds that only letting himself down is easier to manage.
He said, “I feel that making an error in hockey creates more anxiety for me because I feel that I am letting my whole team down. However, there are few situations in hockey that compare to trying to win a match point in tennis, where all eyes are on you.”
Even though he feels worse about making a mistake in hockey, he finds success to be more rewarding when he can share it with teammates.
“I prefer the feeling of making a game-winning play in hockey because you have your teammates that you can celebrate with. A winning play in hockey is also usually created by multiple players, so it is a nice feeling to share the glory with your teammates,” noted Keyser.
He also said that it’s easier to keep a positive attitude in hockey because you have people around you who want to help.
“It is way easier to keep a positive mindset when playing hockey because your teammates can encourage and strategize with you to help overcome a problem that you are experiencing with how you are playing. When playing tennis, you have to calm yourself down, and you have to overcome challenges on the court without the help of anyone but yourself,” said Keyser.
In individual sports, it can sometimes feel like athletes are “out on an island.” It is harder to keep calm when they are by themselves than when they are with some teammates who can cool them down.
“I think one of the ways that individual vs. team sports differ is that in team sports, there is just a much bigger collective identity. If one person on the team does something out of line, the coach is much more likely to punish the entire team,” said athletic director Chris Livatino.
A major theme in all team sports is that players are a part of something bigger than themselves. In individual sports, even though the player may be part of a team, they have to be able to calm themselves down and be responsible for the way they play.
