Abstract

Beyond the quality of research that was produced in sports sciences over the past two decades regarding player’s interpersonal coordination, there is still a gap concerning how a set of player’s can temporarily behave as a single entity, that is as an interpersonal synergy. This gap may be due to a lack of methods that can accurately relate player’s interpersonal coordination with a performance goal. During the last years we dedicate our research efforts aiming to adapt a concept called Uncontrolled Manifold Hypothesis (UCM) which revealed as an useful tool to characterize interpersonal synergies in rugby union, badminton, and football (with a very, very exploratory study!). For this purpose player’s interpersonal angles or player’s interpersonal distance were defined as performance goals which need to remain relatively stable during the course of an action. However, the required performance goal stability was achieved when players reciprocally adjust task elements as running line velocities. When this occur, we were in the presence of interpersonal synergies. The results that we had so far points in several directions. First, within competitive and cooperative contexts there is always interpersonal synergies formation we just need to characterize how these synergies are formed. Our results with badminton data reinforce the hypothesis that for the same performance goal, there were several ways to form interpersonal synergies. Second, it is possible to create a ‘portrait’ of interpersonal synergies formation. As an issue for further research it will be interesting to analyse if this ‘portrait’ remains along several competitive matches. Finally, the control of player’s interactive is on the performance goal, but for that happen some task elements should be left free.