thinking about he wireless issue.
IF.... if the speed of the program interferes with the speed of transmission.
then splitting the two routines over two microcontrollers might help.
one transmitter on each player is constantly sending 'I am alive'
this will be the fail-safe that the system is powered.
upon a strike, a second Arduino, the one watching for the contact, sees the contact and on a set of 4 digital pins, posts some binary code.
The transmitter, watching the digital input pins, sees the 4 binary pins
interprets the data and alters it's transmisson accordingly.
No serial communication between units. One works as fast as it can for sensing, the other as fast as it can for transmitting.