Silence, Signals, and Split-Second Meaning: Nonverbal Communication and Collective Sensemaking in Elite Team Sports

The literature on communication in team sports has also focused mostly on verbal interaction whereas the use of nonverbal cues to facilitate real-time collective sensemaking has been underdeveloped. Based on the coordination theory and the model of collective sensemaking as presented in the communication research, this observational-computational study focused on the topic of nonverbal communication in 24 professional games (12 football and 12 basketball) in Spain La Liga and ACB League. The nonverbal behaviors coded by computer vision-assisted video analysis and human verified are 14,287. The behaviors that were analysed were gestures, direction of gazes, body position, and proxemic modifications among players. The effectiveness of collective sensemaking was evaluated using indicators of coordinated changes in tactics, adaptive play, and quick rebound on mistakes. It was found that dynamic network analysis showed higher densities of nonverbal communication in teams were converging to shared tactical understanding 34% more quickly (p < .001). Hidden Markov model revealed three shared understanding states, with nonverbal signs being the most frequent event that caused a state shift 2.3 times higher than verbal command. These results indicate that nonverbal communication is an interactive system, which distributed and helps in collective cognition and coordinated actions in group sports.