Strategic Interaction in Sports

In sports, time-out is a halt in game. This allows coaches to communicate with each team, determine strategy or inspire morale. Time-outs are often game-changers and bring about a significant change in the game. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to closer elaborate the strategic interaction occurring during and due to the time-outs of a specific sport. In particular, this paper will discuss how the decisions and guidelines during the breaks from opposite coaches might interact and influence the outcome of a handball game.

In handball, coaches are allowed to take exactly three time-outs. As the number is rather low compered to the playing time of 60 minutes, it is vital for a trainer to really enhance the performance of the team during these approximately 1 minute breaks. Easy calculation shows that coaches have 1 chance in every 15 minutes (half-time included) to actually bring about a noticeable change. Therefore, there are several ways to categorically improve the performance and they will be discussed separately in the fallowing paragraphs.

Most common way to win back the initiative is to change the game plan.1 In this situation, the coach from the losing team usually assumes that the winning does not change its game plan. In economic terms, the winning team has a dominant strategy not to change the game plan and the losing team could base its adjustments based on this hypothesis. Unfortunately, there is no proof whether it will work but in fact the possibility is considerable higher due the fact that the previous strategy has not worked. Also, the other team could prevent the change by changing its own game plan and herewith neutralize the effort made by underdog. This is especially common when the time-out is taken extremely late in the game and there is just countable seconds to play.

Another way to influence the curse of the game is to tackle the problem from the psychological side. Motivation in sports is