Shaan Prasad, eleventh grade

I have played competitive tennis since I was eleven years old. As a freshman in high school, I was a state semifinalist in Florida. In eighth grade, I started writing a page before every session to try to improve as fast as possible, and I have filled notebooks ever since. That habit turned into a question I now study: what happens to a player's decisions on pressure points?

I am currently a junior at Holy Trinity Episcopal Academy (Class of 2028), with a strong passion for cognitive science and understanding how the brain works. As a competitive tennis player, I’ve always been fascinated by the connection between the brain and athletic performance. I’ve often wondered how attention, reaction time, decision making, and motor learning affect what happens on the court.

This curiosity led me to explore cognitive science more deeply. My current literature review focuses on how pressure, anxiety, and attention affect performance in tennis, building on my earlier reading on blink-related brain oscillations. On this website, I share my research, my interviews with researchers and coaches, and pages from my tennis journal. For me, this is an opportunity to bring together two things I genuinely love, tennis and cognitive science, while learning more about how the brain influences the way we think, react, and perform.