Groundstroke Velocities Soar in Pro Tennis

[jimlosaltos]

The numbers on the InfoSys center correlate with Hawkeye data reported on television for the tournament.

Here's Tsitsipas averaging 3,263 RPMs on forehands during his match with Medvedev, and a Tsitsipas winner at 114 MPH with 3,937 RPMs. I believe that was the highest spin rate I found at Roland Garros this year.

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[jimlosaltos]

TPN readers had asked on John's earlier spin articles how I gathered the data. Here's an example from this month's velocity article. The Roland Garros web site has a section for data supplied by InfoSys. This is orders of magnitude better than the IBM data provided for Wimbledon. However, there is NO public database of stats. They have to be retrieved one, tedious shot at a time. For this project I literally drilled down on hundreds of individual shots and captured their stats in screen shots. (Yes, I should get a life, but somebody had to do it <g> ).

Here you see data for a specific point during Djokovic's match with Matteo Berrettini, who just might be the heaviest hitter in tennis today. By starting with match stats, then selecting "Winners", and finally click on specific "W" icons for winner, you can see spin, velocity, height above net and the score at that point.

On this shot in the tiebreak, Matteo's forehand is measured by 129 MPH AND 3,930 RPMs. That wasn't the fastest nor the more rapidly spinning shot I found, but the highest combination of the two. As for whether this is an outlier or an isolated error, as I wrote in the article, Matteo had numerous shots that measured in the 120s as did other men.

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[johnyandell]

Let's discuss James E. Fawcette's article, "Groundstroke Velocities Soar in Pro Tennis"