The Serve in Professional Men’s Tennis: Effects of Players’ Handedness

Florian Loffing, Norbert Hagemann and Bernd Strauss

International Journal of Performance Analysis in Sport, 2009, vol. 9, issue 2, 255-274

Abstract: The serve is one of the most important strokes in tennis and has often been the subject of sport scientific investigation. Left-handed players are said to have an advantage in tennis, especially when serving against a right-handed player to the advantage court. We investigated the serving strategies of male left- and righthanded professional tennis players whose serves (N= 4744) were recorded by the automated ball tracking Hawk-Eye system at international tournaments. Right- and left-handed serves differed significantly regarding the ball distribution in the opponent’s service box at both first and second serves as well as regarding the angle of lateral ball flight. As a consequence, players have to take into account different probabilities regarding the direction of serve when awaiting right- vs. lefthanded serves. At the same time, they also need to adjust their return stroke due to the different spin imposed on balls served right- vs. left-handed. Furthermore, analyses also revealed that the left-handers’ serve is not simply mirrored to that of right-handers but still significantly different. In light of the reduced familiarity with the left-hander’s style of play, the findings suggest that for the serve in tennis tactical and technical aspects may promote the left-handers’ advantage.

Date: 2009
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/24748668.2009.11868482 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:rpanxx:v:9:y:2009:i:2:p:255-274

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RPAN20

DOI: 10.1080/24748668.2009.11868482

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Performance Analysis in Sport is currently edited by Peter O'Donoghue

More articles in International Journal of Performance Analysis in Sport from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().