Team sport is a type of competition that involves players from a sports team working together towards a common objective, such as scoring points or goals. Examples include American football, soccer, rugby, field and ice hockey.
In team sports, the simultaneous demand to compete and cooperate is often more pronounced than in individual sports. Even in elite sport, competing and cooperating are required, but cooperative behavior is less important than in team sports. This might be because team athletes are trained to collaborate and support each other to improve their overall performance, whereas individual athletes compete without the need for cooperation with teammates.
A key attribute of a team sport is the constant roster size as specified by the rules and/or league to which a team belongs (e.g., 12 members on a volleyball team with 6 players allowed on the court at any given time). However, teams might reduce the maximum roster size for financial or other exigencies.
The fact that team athletes are constantly interacting with a slate of people provides them an opportunity to develop interpersonal relationships and build effective role models. This is especially true for youth athletes who may seek out effective sports mentors, such as coaches and older team mates.
Team athletes typically participate in periods of high-intensity activity interspersed with low-intensity activities to support play and provide brief recovery opportunities. This creates a challenge for researchers who are trying to evaluate their physical output, as they are not able to discern meaningful changes in their overall performance when using aggregate data alone. Recent advances in descriptive analysis, involving the alignment of tracking systems with tactical context, have begun to address this challenge by providing an understanding of the complexities involved in measuring external load during team sport.