Italian translation at settesei.it
All else equal, you want to serve harder. But how much does it really matter?
That’s a more difficult question than it sounds, and I don’t yet claim to have an answer. In the meantime, I can share the results of some data crunching.
In 2011 U.S. Open matches covered by Pointstream, there were more than 9,000 first serve points. The server won almost exactly 70% of those points. About 11% of points were aces, and another 24% were service winners.
To see the effect of serve speed, I looked at four outcomes: aces, service winners, short points (three or fewer shots), and points won. It’s no surprise that each type of results happens more on faster serves.
Below, find the full numbers for serves of various speeds. The finding that sticks out to me is the small change in service points won from the 95-99 MPH group to the 115-119 MPH group. It may be that the modest increase–put another way, the surprising success rate at 95-104 MPH–is a result of strategic wide serves, or the better ground games of the players who hit slower serves.
So as I said, there’s much more work to be done, identifying the effects of faster serves for individual players, looking at deuce/ad court differences (for righties and lefties), and the results on different serve directions.
MPH SrvPts Ace% SvcW% Short% PtsWon% 85-89 140 2.1% 17.9% 47.1% 55.0% 90-94 275 0.7% 21.5% 47.6% 63.6% 95-99 546 2.2% 18.5% 48.4% 66.1% 100-104 885 4.2% 24.6% 51.0% 66.0% 105-109 1400 6.4% 29.3% 56.6% 68.7% 110-114 1524 8.7% 34.0% 57.3% 69.1% 115-119 1487 12.2% 35.9% 60.8% 69.4% 120-124 1553 16.1% 40.1% 65.2% 73.2% 125-129 941 21.5% 48.1% 72.4% 76.3% 130-134 353 29.7% 58.4% 77.3% 84.4% 135-139 66 27.3% 65.2% 80.3% 89.4%