{"id":540,"date":"2011-10-12T11:04:15","date_gmt":"2011-10-12T15:04:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/heavytopspin.com\/?p=540"},"modified":"2011-10-12T11:04:15","modified_gmt":"2011-10-12T15:04:15","slug":"the-effect-of-serve-speed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/2011\/10\/12\/the-effect-of-serve-speed\/","title":{"rendered":"The Effect of Serve Speed"},"content":{"rendered":"

Italian translation at settesei.it<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

All else equal, you want to serve harder. But how much does it really matter?<\/p>\n

That’s a more difficult question than it sounds, and I don’t yet claim to have an answer. In the meantime, I can share the results of some data crunching.<\/p>\n

In 2011 U.S. Open matches covered by Pointstream, there were more than 9,000 first serve points. The server won almost exactly 70% of those points. About 11% of points were aces, and another 24% were service winners.<\/p>\n

To see the effect of serve speed, I looked at four outcomes: aces, service winners, short points (three or fewer shots), and points won. It’s no surprise that each type of results happens more on faster serves.<\/p>\n

Below, find the full numbers for serves of various speeds. The finding that sticks out to me is the small change in service points won from the 95-99 MPH group to the 115-119 MPH group. It may be that the modest increase–put another way, the surprising success rate at 95-104 MPH–is a result of strategic wide serves, or the better ground games of the players who hit slower serves.<\/p>\n

So as I said, there’s much more work to be done, identifying the effects of faster serves for individual players, looking at deuce\/ad court differences (for righties and lefties), and the results on different serve directions.<\/p>\n

MPH      SrvPts   Ace%  SvcW%  Short%  PtsWon%  \n85-89       140   2.1%  17.9%   47.1%    55.0%  \n90-94       275   0.7%  21.5%   47.6%    63.6%  \n95-99       546   2.2%  18.5%   48.4%    66.1%  \n100-104     885   4.2%  24.6%   51.0%    66.0%  \n105-109    1400   6.4%  29.3%   56.6%    68.7%  \n110-114    1524   8.7%  34.0%   57.3%    69.1%  \n115-119    1487  12.2%  35.9%   60.8%    69.4%  \n120-124    1553  16.1%  40.1%   65.2%    73.2%  \n125-129     941  21.5%  48.1%   72.4%    76.3%  \n130-134     353  29.7%  58.4%   77.3%    84.4%  \n135-139      66  27.3%  65.2%   80.3%    89.4%<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Italian translation at settesei.it All else equal, you want to serve harder. But how much does it really matter? That’s a more difficult question than it sounds, and I don’t yet claim to have an answer. In the meantime, I can share the results of some data crunching. In 2011 U.S. Open matches covered by … Continue reading The Effect of Serve Speed<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[96,104,118],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-research","category-serve-speed","category-u-s-open"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=540"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}