Using network science to analyze tennis stroke patterns
Yunjing Zhou,
Shouxin Zong,
Run Cao,
Miguel-Ángel Gómez,
Chuqi Chen and
Yixiong Cui
Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, 2023, vol. 170, issue C
Abstract:
This research aimed to describe and quantify the stroke patterns profiling professional tennis players by constructing a complex network specifically related to ball bounce locations. A total sample of 16,863 points from 127 Australian Open matches played by 128 male tennis single players were gathered and scrutinized for creating the bipartite tennis stroke network (TSN) with court zones divided into 40 nodes. Afterwards, network metrics were used to assess the prominence of different court zones: in/out-degree centrality (I/ODC), eigenvector centrality (EC), betweenness centrality (BC) and shortest-path length. The results showed that zone-5 (zone-36) and zone-8 (zone-33) generally had higher levels of zone utilization considering their I/ODC, EC and BC. Zone-8 (zone-33) to zone-33 (zone-8) turned out to have the least short path length with a value of 0.0008 in all paths which had the most path utilization. Moreover, different rally lengths and tournament rounds can lead to a series of stroke patterns. As the tournament rounds progressed from the 1st round to the final, the consistency in ball bounces of the zones tended to decrease during short to medium or long rallies. Future investigations and sport performance analysts could adopt the TSN method to analyze tactics and specific striking styles of individual players.
Keywords: Racquet sports; Sports performance analysis; Bipartite network; Pattern; Spatiotemporal data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960077923002060
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:chsofr:v:170:y:2023:i:c:s0960077923002060
DOI: 10.1016/j.chaos.2023.113305
Access Statistics for this article
Chaos, Solitons & Fractals is currently edited by Stefano Boccaletti and Stelios Bekiros
More articles in Chaos, Solitons & Fractals from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Thayer, Thomas R. ().