The big news in sports last week was the 11 hour, 5 minute Wimbledon match between USA’s John Isner and France’s Nicolas Mahut.

In professional tennis, men play the best of five sets (meaning the opponent who wins three sets (of the five) is the winner. In a “set” the players play until a player wins 6 games (though players have to win by a margin of two games).  In the Isner-Mahut match, both players had won two sets. The scores of the first four sets were 6-4, 3-6, 6-7, 7-6. So they were playing a fifth set to see who would win his third set and thus win the match. Because a player must win by two games, the fifth set went all the way up to 70 games won by Isner and 68 games won by Mahut. So the score for their fifth set was 70-68. The match took them more than twice the time a normal match takes.

Get into pairs and, flip to the sports section, and find and read an article about a game played in a sport other than tennis. Take on the role of doctors, psychologists, coaches or sports event planners. Imagine that the game went twice as long as a normal game and write down 10 ways that it would impact the players, from the perspective of your assumed role (i.e. as a doctor, how does it impact the players physically? If a coach, how does it impact team morale? etc.).