Sport and Competition
The 2025 Australian Open's Bold and Biological Experiment
This year's winners maximized the coregulatory benefits of coach and player.
Posted February 3, 2025 Reviewed by Hara Estroff Marano
Key points
- Winners of the 2025 Australian Open capitalized on their relationships with their coaches and support team.
- More than play-calling, coaches must regulate their states to enhance performance through coregulation.
- Performers must carefully select their teams based on their autonomic agility and coregulatory capacities.
The 2025 Australian Open was the first Grand Slam tournament to permit coaches on the court during matches through designated "coaching pods." These pods allowed for real-time communication between players and their support teams. Players could utilize these new pods, which placed their support teams next to them on the court or continue with the traditional coaching boxes in the stands, elevated and adjacent to the court.
During this year's Australian Open men's and women's finals, the winners of each match had their support teams seated in the coaching pods on the court beside them. In contrast, the teams of the two losing players were seated in the stands away from the court.
What might this seating arrangement reveal about the players, their support teams, their relationships with their teams, and their teams' impacts on their physiological reactions and resulting performance outcomes?
Natural Reactions to the Pressure
Each of these elite athletes and finalists in this year's Australian Open—Madison Keys, Aryna Sabalenka, Jannik Sinner, and Alexander Zverev—handles the immense pressure of professional tennis through distinct physiological responses and varying levels of autonomic agility. Their ability to manage stress, regulate emotions, and align their performance with their potential differs based on their bodily reactions, their relationships with these reactions, the narratives they create to make sense of their responses, and the opportunities they have to mitigate their bodily responses through the support of others (i.e., coregulation).
By examining their responses, behaviors on the court, and interactions with their support teams through a neurophysiological lens, we can better understand how each player's performance under pressure reflects their ability or inability to fluidly and flexibly shift between autonomic states. These states range from calm and confident to playful and curious to anxious and agitated and sometimes to hopeless and withdrawn.
Over the course of a few seconds, points, games, sets, match, or tournament, a player and their support team can bounce rapidly between these states or become locked into a single state. They may navigate such autonomic shifts with awareness and intention or react impulsively and uncontrollably. The player and their support team may also attune physiologically, matching states to offer mutual help and support, or they might misalign, break connections, and disrupt one another, ultimately compromising the player's resilience and performance.
Influencing Performance for Better or for Worse
Polyvagal theory emphasizes that our autonomic nervous system significantly impacts our emotional experiences and social interactions. This perspective underscores the importance of cultivating supportive relationships, which can help athletes, leaders, and high achievers of all kinds manage their physiological states for optimal performance more effectively. Whether singing a solo on stage, standing at the free-throw line, or competing in center court at the Australian Open, those around us influence our performance, particularly those we trust and have long-standing relationships with.
The belief that we should isolate ourselves, block everything and everyone out, and rely solely on our individual ability when we step onto the court isn’t necessarily accurate or optimal. Instead, we must carefully choose a support team, considering not only their tactics and expertise but also their ability to manage their own physiological reactions and emotional swings to the inherent fluctuations in our performance.
Yet, it is the responsibility of our support team to align their physiological states with ours without becoming entangled in our distress or adding extra layers on top of it. They meet us where we are, steady us, lift us, calm us, or carry us home: This is the essence of great coaching, leadership, teams, parenting, friendships, human relationships, and performances.
An Anchor of Support or Burden
Alexander Zverev and Aryna Sabalenka, the second-place finishers for men and women, positioned their support teams in the stands off the court. They may, knowingly or unknowingly, realize that their coaches' physiological reactions to their performance can negatively affect their resilience and adaptability. They may recognize that they often feel more tense or become distracted by their coach.
When a coach is overly sensitive to an athlete’s distress, their empathetic responses can intensify the emotional burden on the athlete. In such situations, the player not only has to cope with the challenges of the match and their own internal responses but also feels an added responsibility for their coach’s emotional struggles and physiological disruptions. Empathetic responses are often enhanced in close relationships, like the family bonds between parents and children. Zverev's father and brother serve as his primary coach and support team.
Another possibility is that the player-coach relationship lacks a foundation of physiological safety and trust. If an athlete's nervous system interprets their coach as evaluative rather than supportive—feeling that their acceptance is contingent on performance—the relationship can become a disruption rather than reassurance. Additionally, previous breaches of trust may cause an athlete to adopt a protective, guarded autonomic state, making it difficult to access the coregulatory benefits of social connection.
Rather than feeling safe in their connection with the coach (or others in general), they might associate relational closeness with vulnerability, judgment, or the risk of betrayal. Instead of relying on the coregulatory benefits of trusting relationships, the individuals may become autonomically disrupted when in proximity to others and prioritize self-regulation strategies (e.g., keeping their support teams farther away).
The players may not explicitly acknowledge the reasoning behind keeping team members out of the on-court coaching box. Still, they may intuitively recognize specific individuals as sources of emotional and physiological instability rather than a reliable anchor of support. If that's the case, they may remove a temporary obstacle (place their support team farther away) while inadvertently limiting access to an essential resource for optimizing performance.
Beyond just tactical strategy and play calling, a coach's autonomic flexibility plays a significant role in an athlete's ability to regulate their own nervous system and, consequently, their capacity to remain resilient under pressure. A player should acknowledge their team's role in supporting or disrupting their autonomic state and select their support team carefully.
The Autonomic Role of a Coach
For a coach to be truly effective, they must attune to the player’s physiological shifts without becoming entangled in their own defensive states. An autonomically agile coach can uplift an athlete spiraling into withdrawal, adjust intensity when overly energized, instill confidence in moments of doubt, and provide stability during turbulent times. Similarly, when an athlete is relaxed and in control, a coach can help sustain their high-performing state rather than disrupt it with their own fears and worries.
Coaches achieve this not through words but through the messages conveyed by the tone of their voices, facial expressions, and body language emanating from their autonomic state. Ultimately, the essence of coaching lies not in providing guidance and technique but in acting as a coregulatory anchor for the athlete. This support ensures that the athlete does not have to navigate their physiological landscape alone in the heat of competition.
Coregulating Performance
Optimal performance emerges from a trusting player-coach relationship, in which both parties engage in coregulating exchanges. Sometimes, the coach leads; other times, they move alongside the athlete, and at moments, they may even follow the athlete. Throughout this process, they navigate the range of physiological states necessary to tackle the dynamic challenges of competition and performance.
Both the player and the coach exhibit autonomic agility—the ability to fluidly and intentionally shift between different autonomic states without getting stuck in defensive or protective modes. Together, they create a more resilient and adaptable coregulatory team, enhancing their overall autonomic agility and deepening their physiological trust in one another.
Australian Open champions Jannik Sinner and Madison Keys, who trust their support teams, demonstrate how social support can enhance physiological resilience in elite competition. Meanwhile, Alexander Zverev and Aryna Sabalenka, by distancing themselves from their coaching box, may have inadvertently compromised their autonomic agility and performance by rejecting a critical component of human adaptation—coregulation.