The research team, led by Shiyuna Kazama and Hiroko Tanabe of Hokkaido University’s Graduate School of Humanities and Human Sciences, recruited sixteen male collegiate tennis players and systematically recombined them across sessions to produce twenty-nine unique doubles pairings over seventeen competitive matches. Before each match, both partners completed the Group Environment Questionnaire, an eighteen-item self-report instrument assessing cohesion across four subscales covering individual attraction to the group, both task-related and social, and group integration, likewise split into task and social dimensions. The questionnaire was adapted for the dyadic context by replacing the word team with pair, and its internal consistency was acceptable, with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients ranging from .67 to .81. Crucially, rather than averaging the two partners’ scores, the researchers calculated the absolute difference between them for each subscale, producing a within-dyad discrepancy score for every dimension of perceived cohesion.

That discrepancy metric is the study’s conceptual heart. Averaging partners’ ratings captures the overall level of cohesion a pair perceives, but it erases information about the extent to which the two partners agree. Two dyads can report identical mean cohesion while differing enormously in perceptual congruence, and previous research in sporting dyads and team settings has shown that dissimilarity between partners in psychological characteristics can be associated with poorer relationship functioning. Communication was measured behaviorally rather than by self-report: lapel microphones with high noise cancellation recorded all verbal exchanges between points, and each conversation was coded as tactical, meaning it concerned anticipated shots, player movements, court positioning, or strategic planning for the subsequent point, or non-tactical. A second trained rater independently coded a subset of the data, yielding moderate agreement with a Cohen’s kappa of .60 and an overall percent agreement of 92.7 percent. Performance was quantified objectively from video as point rate, serve success rate, and return success rate.

The researchers then tested a structural model linking cohesion discrepancies, tactical communication, and rally-level performance using exploratory covariance-based structural equation modeling with 5,000 bootstrap resamples, supplemented by a partial least squares SEM as a robustness check. The most striking result concerned the social integration subscale, GI-S, which reflects how partners perceive the social unity of their group. Greater within-dyad discrepancy in GI-S was associated with a lower tactical communication rate, with a standardized path coefficient of −0.45 and a p-value of .047. Discrepancies in the other three cohesion subscales showed no statistically significant paths to tactical communication. Meanwhile, a higher tactical communication rate was associated with a lower point rate, with a standardized coefficient of −0.36 and p = .012, while its associations with serve success and return success rates were not significant. The hypothesized indirect effect of GI-S discrepancy on point rate through tactical communication was not statistically significant, with a bootstrap confidence interval spanning zero.

Here the story takes a turn that separates careful science from viral simplification. The PLS-SEM robustness check reproduced the same directions and magnitudes, although the GI-S discrepancy path slipped just past conventional significance at p = .052. More importantly, the researchers recognized that their dyadic observations were not independent: individual players appeared in multiple pairings, and opposing dyads were nested within the same matches. Dependency-aware sensitivity analyses, including match-level mixed-effects models and Bayesian multiple-membership models accounting for repeated player participation, were therefore conducted. Under these stricter analyses, the GI-S discrepancy and tactical communication association was not statistically significant, and the negative tactical communication and point rate association, while retained in direction across every analytical approach, was not clearly supported statistically. The authors are explicit that these findings provide preliminary, hypothesis-generating evidence rather than definitive relationships.

Why would social cohesion, rather than task cohesion, be the dimension that mattered? The researchers find this theoretically noteworthy. Tactical communication in the study was entirely task-oriented, covering shots, movements, and strategy, yet the exploratory model linked it to how similarly partners perceived their social integration. One interpretation is that explicit tactical exchanges may be shaped not only by task-related perceptions but also by the social-relational context of the dyad: partners who perceive their social bond differently may engage differently in the kind of open, explicit coordination that tactical talk requires. It is also worth noting that pairs showed no substantial difference in total GEQ scores between winning and losing combinations, with both averaging around 130, suggesting that aggregate cohesion levels alone do not distinguish successful dyads from unsuccessful ones.

The negative association between tactical communication and point rate is the study’s most counterintuitive finding, and the authors offer two candidate mechanisms. The first concerns cognitive load. Doubles tennis demands rapid action selection under continuously changing information, and prior research shows that complex executive demands and concurrent cognitive and physical tasks can increase cognitive load and interfere with performance. Extensive tactical discussion immediately before play, covering specific anticipated shots and movements, may impose processing demands that interfere with rapid or relatively automatic execution. A related possibility draws on task switching research, which consistently demonstrates performance costs when individuals must shift from a previously prepared task set to another. When the actual rally deviates from the tactical scenario discussed between points, players may need to update or abandon the prepared action plan, potentially delaying adaptive response. Cognitive load was not directly measured, so this remains a proposed mechanism rather than a demonstrated account.

The second mechanism is arguably more subversive: perhaps struggling pairs simply talk more. Pairs experiencing unsuccessful points or tactical problems may engage in more explicit discussion to adjust positioning, shot selection, or strategic plans, meaning poorer performance may elicit tactical communication rather than tactical communication producing poorer performance. The observational, cross-sectional design cannot distinguish these temporal or causal directions. The authors also point out that tactical communication rate was not associated with serve success or return success, which represent more constrained components of play, whereas the broader rally requires continuous adaptation to partners and opponents. Some well-coordinated dyads may require less explicit verbal exchange because their coordination has become implicit or anticipatory, built on prior experience and shared expectations, so a lower frequency of tactical talk would not necessarily indicate poorer coordination.

The limitations are substantial and honestly cataloged. The sample of twenty-nine dyads limited statistical power, particularly for detecting indirect effects. Participants were exclusively male collegiate players, constraining generalizability. Prior partner-specific playing and practice experience was not systematically assessed, although some dyads had previously competed together, and such familiarity may have shaped both cohesion perceptions and communication patterns. The dyadic adaptation of the GEQ was not independently psychometrically validated. Most fundamentally, absolute difference scores collapse both partners’ original ratings into a single value, so an association involving a discrepancy score does not establish that discrepancy itself, rather than the underlying cohesion levels of one or both partners, accounts for the outcome. Future studies should retain both partners’ ratings and apply polynomial regression and dyadic response surface analysis to disentangle congruence from underlying levels.

What remains is a genuinely fresh perspective on a sport played by millions. The study focused solely on verbal communication and did not capture nonverbal coordination such as positioning, movement synchronization, or gestures, and the authors call for point-by-point time-series analyses linking tactical content to events during the subsequent rally, examining whether performance depends on the correspondence between anticipated and actual play. Practically, they suggest training may benefit not from encouraging more or less communication, but from helping pairs develop when and how to communicate tactical information efficiently while maintaining the capacity to flexibly adapt when anticipated and actual situations diverge. More broadly, the findings reframe tactical communication in dyadic sport not as mere information transfer, but as a coordination process embedded within an interpersonal relationship and an unfolding competitive context. The next time you see two partners huddling between points, remember: the frequency of their talk may say less about their coordination than the relationship underneath it.

Subject of Research: Structural relationships among pair cohesion, tactical communication, and performance in doubles tennis: a structural equation modeling approach

Article Title: Structural relationships among pair cohesion, tactical communication, and performance in doubles tennis: a structural equation modeling approach

Article References: Kazama, S., & Tanabe, H. (2026). Structural relationships among pair cohesion, tactical communication, and performance in doubles tennis: a structural equation modeling approach. Frontiers in Sports and Active Living, 8, Article 1920125. https://doi.org/10.3389/fspor.2026.1920125

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fspor.2026.1920125

Keywords: Structural, relationships, pair, cohesion, tactical, communication, performance, doubles, tennis, equation, modeling, approach