So Long Second Serve?

Traditionally when playing tennis, players will hit their first serve harder and flatter and closer to the lines than their second serves.  This causes a lower percentage of first serves to go in the box, but a higher winning percentage when they do.  Second serves, with less speed, more spin and a higher margin of safety go in more often, but the server wins a lower percentage of those points.  So far so good.

I was watching Ivo Karlovic play Roger Federer in the 2012 Australian Open the other night.  Ivo was struggling to win points on his second serve, but was serving a high percentage of first serves.  Since Ivo is 6'10" tall, his serve is awesome and he was winning a high percentage of points when his first serve was in the box.  Both players held serve until a first set tie-break.  Ivo got himself a set point, serving at 6-5 in the tie-breaker.  He missed his first serve.  Uh oh.  I'd been telling my wife for half an hour that he should be bombing second serves, and at set point I was yelling at my TV.  "Bring it, Ivo!!!  Pound the second serve!".  He spun it in, lost a flukey point.  Lost the set and the match.

Odds are Ivo would have lost the match no matter what he did on that point.  Federer is better than Ivo Karlovic.  However, Ivo would have given himself a better chance to win on this occasion if he had hit two "first serves" rather than a first and a second serve.  The data for this match are obvious, but what's interesting is the data for the tournament so far indicate that the strategy of hitting two first serves may become the norm in men's tennis in the not-too-distant future.

Here are the stats for Dr. Ivo against Federer.  Ivo made 71% of his first serves (ave speed 123 mph) for a winning percentage of 76% on first serve.  Ivo made 71% of his second serves (ave speed of 105 mph) for a winning percentage of 34%.  It should be obvious from those stats why hitting two bombs was a better idea for Ivo than spinning in a second serve, if you can call hitting it 105 mph spinning it in!  Ivo missed way too many of his second serves.  Typically ATP tour pros make 95% or more of their second serves.  Perhaps under pressure from Federer, Ivo made a woeful 71% of his second serves, the same as his much harder first serve.  So by abandoning the losing slower serve, Ivo would have increased his winning percentage on serve from 62% to 74%.  That's a dramatic increase in his chances of holding serve.

As I said, that case was easy because of Dr. Ivo's tragic second serve percentage and woeful winning percentage on second serve.  But what about for the field in general?

Here are the first round stats (the second two rounds are similar, but with fewer data points).  The men made 61% of their first serves and won 69% of those points.  They made 96% of their second serves and won 49% of those points.  The result of all that is that servers won 61% of their points using the traditional "hard first, spin second" serving strategy.

What would the numbers look like if the men had hit "hard" serves for both first and second serves?  They would have won 58.5% of their service points.  So in aggregate, for now, the traditional serving strategy is the better one by 61% to 58.5%.

My guess is that as players get taller and returners continue to get better, that gap will vanish for everyone like it vanished for Dr. Ivo.

If that gap does vanish and men hit two bombs, if necessary, on each point, the enjoyment level of men's tennis will fall dramatically.  We'll be back to the days of Sampras vs Ivanisevic at Wimbledon.  Yawn.  Let's hope that doesn't happen.

Expertise

"An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field."
                                                      –Niels Bohr


I've made so many mistakes of the "three-across forehands" and "low to high" variety that I cringe to relive my teaching past.

Unfortunately, I think I'm a long way from "making all the mistakes that can be made" in tennis coaching.  It's not a narrow enough field.  And tennis isn't stable either.  It's a fertile environment for growing new mistakes!

Time to Add a Sport

So, Mike Bohn says CU is going to add a women's sport.  What sport will he add?  Time for a BRG poll.

Online Surveys & Market Research

Swinging Volley

My forehand backswing tends to be a bit long and "slappy". I've been trying to shorten the swing, but haven't had much luck.  Being almost 50 years old with 40 years of tennis under my belt makes any change tough.  One thing that seems to help is taking the ball out of the air from the baseline, a full-court swinging volley.  He's a compact version of my forehand doing just that.



Compare the length of that swing to any of the swings below.

Forehand Balance and Swing Exercise

The exercise below, borrowed and slightly modified from Ray Brown, has been helping me make my forehand better. I'm trying to keep my racquet up until my legs begin to extend. I'm also trying to delay the forward swing of the racquet until my hips then shoulders have begun rotating toward the ball.

I'm trying to do this exercise a couple of times per day (backhand, too) for maybe five or ten minutes at a stretch. Then I try to feel this rhythm and timing in my swings when I hit balls. So far I feel like it's helping. At the risk of falling for the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, I had never hit a 91 mph forehand before doing this exercise, but did afterwards.

Better than B.E.S.T?

OK, so the study looked at complex pattern recognition not tennis strokes, but the little cartoon in the video intro shows a tennis player.  So...

Check this out.  "Learning high-performance tasks with no conscious effort may soon be possible."

Sweet.  Bring it on.

Mike Agassi, B.E.S.T. Pioneer?

Below I wrote a bit about Brian Gordon's B.E.S.T. System for tennis mechanics. As the game of tennis has evolved, players have less and less time to execute their groundstrokes. Incoming ball speeds are getting higher and higher. In order to achieve high racquet speeds under extreme time duress, players have learned to shorten their backswings yet still produce high racquet speeds. They do this through what Brian calls "neuromuscular optimization".

Working with Rick Macci, Brian has developed a method, a progression, for teaching these optimal neuromuscular processes in young tennis players. I don't, yet, know the details of this teaching methodology. I hope to learn it in the next several months. In the meantime, I remembered the early training of Andre Agassi as Andre described it in his book, Open. Below I'll describe roughly what Andre described on pages 26-30 of that book. It sounds like Andre's dad, Mike, was following a B.E.S.T protocol, though the abuse Andre describes probably isn't part of Brian and Rick's system!

So how did Mike Agassi train Andre? First, the set-up.

Mike rigged up a ball machine to shoot balls at 110 mph down at Andre from an elevated position at the net. The placement and orientation of the ball machine did two things. First it deprived Andre of time. A ball shot at 110 mph from about 39 feet away was till traveling at 87 mph at the bounce. That's an average speed of about 145 feet per second. With Andre crowding the baseline, he had about 270 milliseconds from the time the ball left the machine until it hit the ground. That's very near the limits of human reaction times. Mike was definitely putting Andre under time pressure!

Second, the angle of the incoming ball forced Andre to take the ball on the rise. I don't know how high the machine was, but it's likely that the balls would still be rising as they hit the fence behind Andre if he didn't hit the ball. An ascending angle of incidence is the most difficult for applying topspin, meaning you need more racquet speed to put topspin on a ball ascending into your strings than on one descending into your strings. So Andre was forced to swing fast if he was going to put topspin on the ball.

Finally, Mike made the net six inches higher than standard so that Andre would be sure to clear regulation height nets. If Andre was going to get the ball over this higher net and down into the court at high ball speeds, he would need tremendous topspin to do so.

So what did Mike want Andre to do in these conditions? Well, first he wanted him to hit a million balls. Literally. Each year. Mike's goal was for Andre to hit 2,500 balls per day. That's 17,500 per week and almost 1 million balls per year. Brian Gordon says that extreme repetition is the only way to ingrain the neuromuscular patterns necessary to hit tennis balls well. Check. A million hits a year is a lot of repetition.

Second, Mike insisted that Andre take the ball early, take it on the rise. He wanted Andre to shorten his backswing. Always short. That's the modern evolution Brian talks about. No time for a "backswing the size of West Texas" he told me the other day. Check.

Mike insisted that Andre swing hard. "Hit the ball hard," he kept saying. So a short backswing while generating high racquet speed. Modern. Check.

Mike was constantly on Andre to "brush the ball", to hit topspin. "More topspin," Mike would yell. So by taking the ball on the rise, hitting hard, and brushing the ball for topspin, Andre had to swing very fast. Modern.

Mike was also intolerant of errors, particularly errors into the net. Mike would "foam at the mouth" when Andre would hit the ball into the net. He was unhappy with errors wide and long, too, but the errors into the net seemed to set him off.

Mike forced Andre to hit literally millions of shots under extreme time pressure, with short backswings, high racquet speed, while generating high ball speeds and spins. That's what the modern game demands of players. That's what the B.E.S.T. System seeks to train, if I understand it well enough.

I'm not endorsing Mike's methods for everyone. Andre clearly hated every second of this experience.  But it looks to me like Mike trained Andre well for the modern game of tennis. No question Andre learned what Mike wanted him to learn.