Editor's note: This story is part of Peak, The Athletic's desk covering leadership, personal development and success through the lens of sports. Follow Peak here.
NEW YORK -- Before this year's French Open women's final, Coco Gauff had a decision to make.
Like most tennis players, Gauff listens to music before matches, but the way she sees it, there are rap days and there are gospel days. Before her semifinal match against Lois Boisson at Roland Garros, she had felt so good that she had opted for rap. But before the final against No. 1-seeded Aryna Sabalenka, she sensed a different mood and went with gospel music.
“When I’m feeling super nervous,” Gauff said, “I listen to gospel because I am like, OK, I need a higher power or something to calm me down.”
Gauff, 21, prevailed in three sets and claimed her second grand slam. The gospel music helped.
“I felt like it definitely carried me,” she said.
Gauff, who is seeded third at this year's U.S. Open, is far from the only player who will obsess over their pre-match listening. Iga Świątek, the second-seeded woman, prefers a classic rock playlist of AC/DC, Guns N' Roses and Led Zeppelin. Early in his career, world No. 1 Jannik Sinner used a classic: "Lose Yourself" by Eminem.
A player's choice of music might seem like mere superstition, a personal preference to set the right mood. And that is part of it. But academic research has shown that the type of music an athlete listens to before a match or game can have a surprising and consequential impact on performance.
Christopher Ballmann is an associate professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He's also a classically trained viola player who played guitar in a metal band and studied molecular physiology. About 10 years ago, he combined his interests and started researching music's effects on the body and mind.
When people listen to their favorite music, he said, it alters the release of neurotransmitters in the brain, increasing dopamine, which drives motivation, and norepinephrine, which controls our psychological arousal or alertness. The combination can lead to increased focus and effort.
Scientists are still studying how long the effect lasts. But studies have shown that listening to music before a task can lead to more explosive performance and faster sprint speeds in a lab environment.
“It's both psychological and physiological,” Ballmann said.
In the hours before his matches, Ben Shelton tries to achieve a simple mindset.
“For me,” he said, “it's calm but motivated.”
His routine includes film study of his opponent, some visualization and, often, a short nap in which he closes his eyes and quiets his thoughts.
“Clarity of mind is important,” he said. “Music is a part of it.”
Shelton, 22, is back at the U.S. Open for a third time, attempting to punctuate the most fruitful year of his young career. He won his first ATP Masters 1000 event in early August, claiming the title in Montreal. He's ascended to a career-high No. 6 in the world. And now he's back in his favorite event, the one he calls "the biggest tournament of the year for me."
For Shelton, a five-set match at the U.S. Open is "like a chess match, but a marathon," a chaotic concerto where different moments require different mental tools.
“Some matches, depending on my energy levels, I’m going to have to bring a little bit more and try to cook up more energy somehow and get myself to a point where I feel like I’m aggressive and ready to go,” Shelton said. “Even if I don’t physically feel that way.”
That's where music comes in.
Shelton's rap Mt. Rushmore includes Lil Wayne, Drake, and, depending on the day, Lil Baby. But this year, his pre-match playlist has been solely Future, an artist who emerged from Atlanta, the city where Shelton spent his formative years while his father Bryan coached college tennis at Georgia Tech.
That athletes often crave consistency is not surprising, Ballmann said. It's not that specific genres of music are more beneficial than others. It's that athletes who listen to their preferred genres before competition see a clear boost in motivation and arousal -- an association strong enough that it repeatedly shows up in studies.
“What’s most interesting to me is that it’s not just that if you listen to something that you like, you get better,” Ballmann said. “But if you listen to something you don’t like, you get worse sometimes.”
In a recent study, he found that a population of male weightlifters performed worse when they listened to censored versions of songs, with the profanities removed. While the relationship is still being understood, the finding fell in line with previous research. It might be, Ballmann said, that the group in the study just preferred the familiar versions with foul language.
"Across all the different exercises, modes and everything," Ballmann said,"your music preference is really what carries the power."
Researchers have been studying the relationship between music and performance for decades. But for much of that time, scientists concerned themselves with how music affected performance during a competition.
In a review paper published in 2011 in the International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology, Costas Karageorghis and David-Lee Priest, researchers at Brunel University in London, described music as a "type of legal performance-enhancing drug."
For instance, listening to music has long been banned in professional track and field events and marathons, for safety reasons as well as performance.
Yet in recent decades, more scientists have looked at the effects of pre-task music. In one notable study published in 1995, researchers had 15 collegiate sprinters run a series of 60-meter dashes. In some rounds, the sprinters listened to the theme from Rocky for a minute before running. In others, they listened to nothing. The runners ran faster after listening to music.
Other studies have shown that tempo and volume can affect psychological outcomes, with slower music helping calm athletes before performance, decreasing their "fight-or-flight response," while faster-paced music increased alertness, arousal and attention.
When Swiatek won her first Wimbledon earlier this summer, she credited a pre-match playlist of classic rock. A cerebral 24-year-old from Poland who won the U.S. Open in 2022, Swiatek wouldn't necessarily profile as a fan of AC/DC, the iconic rock band of the 1970s and '80s. But her relationship to the music, she said, stemmed more from its impact on her preparation than her need to collect classic rock vinyl.
“If I would listen to that all the time,” she told fans at Wimbledon, “I wouldn’t be able to sleep.”
For Gauff, the 2023 U.S. Open champion, it's about sensing how she feels in the moment. When she won the French Open, she paraphrased Tyler, The Creator, one of her favorite artists, whose lyrics had been dancing in her head in Paris: I ain't ever had a doubt inside me.
In other ways, her approach is simple.
On instinct, she chooses between rap and gospel. But research has shown that, depending on the match, each one may give her just what she needs.