Serve strategy in professional women's doubles tennisa data-driven perspective

  1. Fernando Vives 1
  2. Javier Lázaro 1
  3. José Francisco Guzmán 1
  4. Miguel Crespo 2
  5. Rafael Martínez-Gallego 1
  1. 1 Universitat de València
    info

    Universitat de València

    Valencia, España

    ROR https://ror.org/043nxc105

  2. 2 International Tennis Federation, London
Revista:
Retos: nuevas tendencias en educación física, deporte y recreación

ISSN: 1579-1726,  1988-2041

Año de publicación: 2024

Número: 60

Páginas: 955-962

Tipo: Artículo

DIALNET GOOGLE SCHOLAR lock_openDialnet editor

Otras publicaciones en: Retos: nuevas tendencias en educación física, deporte y recreación

Resumen

This study aimed to identify the key variables that influence the effectiveness of the first serve in women’s doubles matchesusing a deep learning training model. A total of 4939 first serves by 145 players from Billie Jean King Cup matches were classified according to their effectiveness. Data from the Hawk-Eye system were filtered and processed to obtain descriptive statistics of the spatio-temporal predictor variables and then to calculate the most important variables for first serve effectiveness. The angle of the serve as the feature that gained more relevance, along with the speed and distance from the bounce to the sidelines, regardless of the side from which the serve was made. The training model showed novel results, identifying that the values of the serve angle between 5.5º-8.7º increased the effectiveness from 22.2% to 48.5% on the Deuce side and from 17.3% to 45.7% on the Advantage side. These findings align with existing research on men's professional tennis singles and offer valuable insights into strategic and coaching ap-proaches. The insights gathered from this study are poised to enhance training methodologies and match-day strategies, providing a strategic edge in serve selection during competitive play.

Referencias bibliográficas

  • Abidin, A. & Ruslan, N. (2020). Exploring the importance of players’ characteristics and performance on serve and return of serve in winning the women’s singles Grand Slam tennis tournaments. Journal of Physics. Conference Series, 1496(1), 012008.
  • Avkhimovich, N. (2023). Should the strongest serve first? Strategic ordering of servers in doubles tennis. Applied Econom-ics, 1-10.
  • Baiget, E., Corbi, F., & López, J. L. (2023). Influence of anthropometric, ball impact and landing location parameters on serve velocity in elite tennis competition. Biology of Sport, 40(1), 273.
  • Bal, B. S. & Dureja, G. (2012). Hawk Eye: A Logical Innovative Technology Use in Sports for Effective Decision Mak-ing. Sport Science Review, 21.
  • BJKC (2023). Billie Jean King Cup History. Available at: https://www.billiejeankingcup.com/en/about/history. Accessed 8 March.
  • Borderias, M., Crespo, M., Martí¬nez-Gallego, R. & Baiget, E. (2023). Comparison of the game structure and point end-ing during Grand Slam women’s doubles tennis. International Journal of Sports Science & Coaching, 18(4), 1248-1255. https://doi.org/10.1177/17479541221098226
  • Borderias, M., Fernández-Fernández, J., Martínez-Gallego, R. & Baiget, E. (2021). Comparison of the activity profile during Grand Slam women’s doubles tennis. International Journal of Performance Analysis in Sport, 21, 1066 – 1080.
  • Born, P., Malejka, L., Behrens, M., Grambow, R., Meffert, D., Breuer, J., & Vogt, T. (2021). Stroke placement in women’s professional tennis: What’s after the serve?. Int. j. racket sports sci. vol. 3(1), 2021, 37-44.
  • Brown, E. G. (2021) A faster serve has more impact on success for female elite tennis players than males, International Journal of Performance Analysis in Sport, 21(4), 600-610.
  • Carboch, J., & Kočíb, T. (2016). A comparison of service efficiency between players of male and female doubles at professional tennis tournaments. Auc Kinanthropologica, 51(2), 56-62.
  • Crespo, M., Filipcic, A., Panjan, A., Reid, M., Šarabon, N., & Zečić, M. (2015). Differences in performance indicators of elite tennis players in the period 1991- 2010. Journal of physical education and sport, 15, 671-677.
  • Durán, A., Martínez-Gallego, R., & Gimeno, M. (2022). Diferencias de género en la aproximación al cambio de direc-ción en tenistas profesionales (Gender differences in the approach to change of direction in professional tennis play-ers). Retos, 43, 938–943. https://doi.org/10.47197/retos.v43i0.88803
  • Filipcic, A., Leskosek, B., Crespo, M., & Filipcic, T. (2021). Matchplay characteristics and performance indicators of male junior and entry professional tennis players. International Journal of Sports Science & Coaching, 16(3), 768-776.
  • Filipcic, A., Zecic, M., Reid, M., Crespo, M., Panjan, A., & Nejc, S. (2015). Differences in performance indicators of elite tennis players in the period 1991-2010. Journal of Physical Education and Sport, 15(4), 671.
  • Fitzpatrick, A., Stone, J. A., Choppin, S., & Kelley, J. (2024). Analysing Hawk-Eye ball-tracking data to explore success-ful serving and returning strategies at Wimbledon. International Journal of Performance Analysis in Sport, 24(3), 251-268.
  • Fitzpatrick, A., Stone, J. A., Choppin, S., & Kelley, J. (2019). Important performance characteristics in elite clay and grass court tennis match-play. International Journal of Performance Analysis in Sport, 19(6), 942–952. https://doi.org/10.1080/24748668.2019.1685804
  • Giles, B., Kovalchik, S. & Reid, M. (2020) A machine learning approach for automatic detection and classification of changes of direction from player tracking data in professional tennis. Journal of Sports Sciences, 38(1), 106-113, doi: 10.1080/02640414.2019.1684132
  • Grambow, R., Born, P., O’Shannessy, C., Breuer, J., Meffert, D., & Vogt, T. (2022). Serve efficiency development in women’s vs. men’s professional tennis. Human movement, 23(2), 128-137.
  • Grambow, R., Oshannessy, C., Born, P., Meffert, D. & Vogt, T. (2021). Serve efficiency development indicates an extended women’s tennis world class cohort: Analysing 14 years of Ladies Wimbledon Championships – implications for coaching. Human Movement.
  • Hawk-eye innovations. (2015). Hawk-Eye’s accuracy & reliability: Electronic line calling. Basingstoke.
  • Infantes, P., Hidalgo, C. & Sánchez-Álcaraz Martínez, B. J. (2020). Perfiles de juego en función de las estadísiticas del saque del top 25 masculino de tenis. Education, Sport, Health and Physical Activity (ESHPA). International Journal, 4(3), 313-323.
  • Jindo, T., Mitsuhashi, D., & Kubota, T. (2022). Accuracy of subjective stats of key performance indicators in tennis. International Journal of Racket Sports Science, 4(2), 32-39.
  • Kingma, D. P., & Ba, J. (2015). Adam: a method for stochastic optimization. Conference Paper at ICLR 2015. arXiv preprint arXiv:1412.6980.
  • Kocib, T., Carboch, J., Cabela, M., & Kresta, J. (2020). Tactics in tennis doubles: analysis of the formations used by the serving and receiving teams. Int J Phys Educ Fit Sport, 9(2), 45-50.
  • Kovalchik, S. A., Bane, M. K. & Reid, M. (2017). Getting to the top: an analysis of 25 years of career rankings trajecto-ries for professional women’s tennis. Journal of sports sciences, 35(19), 1904-1910.
  • Krishnan Rajbahadur, G., Wang, S., Kamei, Y., & Hassan, A. E. (2022). The impact of feature importance methods on the interpretation of defect classifiers. arXiv e-prints, arXiv-2202.
  • Kuhn, M., & Johnson, K. (2013). Applied predictive modeling (Vol. 26, p. 13). New York: Springer.
  • Martínez-Gallego, R., Crespo, M. & Jiménez, J. (2021a). Analysis of the differences in serve effectiveness between Billie Jean King Cup (former Fed Cup) and Davis Cup doubles tennis matches. International Journal of Sports Science & Coach-ing, 16(3), 777-783.
  • Martínez-Gallego, R., Ramón-Llín, J. & Crespo, M. (2021b). A Cluster Analysis Approach to Profile Men and Women’s Volley Positions in Professional Tennis Matches (Doubles). Sustainability, 13, 6370.
  • Martinez-Gallego, R., Salvador, S. M., Luján, J. F. G., Reid, M., Ramón-Llin, J., & Crespo, M. (2021c). Challenging serve myths in doubles tennis. International Journal of Sports Science & Coaching, 16(6), 1305-1311.
  • Mecheri, S., Rioult, F., Mantel, B., Kauffmann, F. & Benguigui, N. (2016). The serve impact in tennis: First large‐scale study of big Hawk‐Eye data. Statistical Analysis and Data Mining: The ASA Data Science Journal, 9(5), 310-325. https://doi.org/10.1002/sam.11316
  • O’Donoghue, P. (2002). Performance models of ladies’ and men’s singles tennis at the Australian Open. International Journal of Performance Analysis in Sport, 2(1), 73-84.
  • Reid, M., & Duffield, R. (2014). The development of fatigue during match-play tennis. British journal of sports medicine, 48(Suppl 1), i7.
  • Reid, M., McMurtrie, D. & Crespo, M. (2010). The relationship between match statistics and top 100 ranking in profes-sional men’s tennis. International Journal of Performance Analysis in Sport, 10(2), 131-138.
  • Reid, M., Morgan, S. & Whiteside, D. (2016). Match play characteristics of Grand Slam tennis: implications for training and conditioning. Journal of sports sciences, 34(19), 1791-1798.
  • Rioult, F., Mecheri, S., Mantel, B., Kauffmann, F., & Benguigui, N. (2015, September). What can hawk-eye data reveal about serve performance in tennis?. In MLSA15-Machine Learning and Data Mining for Sports Analytics, workshop (ECML/PKDD 2015) (Vol. 1970, pp. 36-45).
  • Sánchez-Pay, A., Ortega-Soto, J.A., Courel-Ibáñez, J. & Sánchez-Alcaraz, B.J. (2022). El servicio en tenis profesional femenino: influencia del ranking y la lateralidad. Revista internacional de medicina y ciencias de la actividad física y el de-porte, 22(86), 255-267.
  • Sánchez-Alcaraz Martínez, B. J., Perona Arce, F., & Courel-Ibáñez, J. (2018). Parámetros de Rendimiento en el Servicio y Resto del Top-100 Femenino en Tenis. Revista Kronos, 17(1).
  • Stănescu, R. (2016). Comparative Study on the Efficiency of Women Tennis Players’ First Serve at Australian Open 2014 and 2015. In V. Grigore, M. Stanescu, & M. Paunescu (Eds.), Physical Education, Sport and Kinetotherapy - ICPESK 2015, (11). European Pcroceedings of Social and Behavioural Sciences (pp. 202-209). Future Academy. https://doi.org/10.15405/epsbs.2016.06.28
  • van Meurs, E., Buszard, T., Kovalchik, S., Farrow, D., & Reid, M. (2021). Interpersonal coordination in tennis: as-sessing the positional advantage index with Australian Open Hawkeye data. International Journal of Performance Analysis in Sport, 21(1), 22-32.
  • Vaverka, F., Nykodym, J., Hendl, J., Zhanel, J., & Zahradnik, D. (2018). Association between serve speed and court surface in tennis. International Journal of Performance Analysis in Sport, 18(2), 262–272. https://doi.org/10.1080/24748668.2018.1467995
  • Vives, F., Crespo, M., Guzmán, J. F., & Martínez-Gallego, R. (2022). Effective serving strategies in men’s doubles Davis cup matches: an analysis using tracking technology. International Journal of Performance Analysis in Sport, 22(4), 638-648.
  • Vives, F., Lázaro, J., Guzmán, J. F., Martínez-Gallego, R., & Crespo, M. (2023). Optimizing Sporting Actions Effective-ness: A Machine Learning Approach to Uncover Key Variables in the Men’s Professional Doubles Tennis Serve. Applied Sciences, 13(24), 13213.
  • Wei, X., Lucey, P., S. Morgan, S. & Sridharan, S. "Predicting Shot Locations in Tennis Using Spatiotemporal Data," 2013 International Conference on Digital Image Computing: Techniques and Applications (DICTA), Hobart, TAS, Australia, 2013, pp. 1-8, doi: 10.1109/DICTA.2013.6691516.
  • Wei, X., Lucey, P., Stuart Morgan, Carr, P., Reid, M. & Sridharan, S. (2015). Predicting Serves in Tennis using Style Priors. In Proceedings of the 21th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Min-ing (KDD '15). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 2207–2215. https://doi.org/10.1145/2783258.2788598
  • Whiteside, D., & Reid, M. (2017). Spatial characteristics of professional tennis serves with implications for serving aces: A machine learning approach. Journal of sports sciences, 35(7), 648-654.
  • Whiteside, D., Elliott B.C., Lay B.S. & Reid, M. (2013). The effect of age on discrete kinematics of the elite female tennis serve. J Appl Biomech;29(5):573-82
  • Whiteside, D., Elliott, B.C., Lay, B.S., & Reid, M. (2015). Coordination and variability in the elite female tennis serve. Journal of Sports Sciences, 33, 675 - 686.
Fuente de los datos: Dialnet