Choosing Your Destiny: Analyzing Serving and Returning Strategies in Professional Tennis

Abstract

Serve and returns are the most important shots in tennis, yet there are still many aspects of these strokes that remain unstudied. Using qualitative analysis and traditional statistics, we analyze how return impact locations effect point outcomes at the Australian Open and Roland Garros. Players tend to fall into two categories on the return of serve: aggressive and passive, which is reflected by return impact position and differences in average rally length. But the causality between serve type and return position is still unclear. Additionally, we use recursive feature elimination to design a logistic regression model that leverages return of serve ball tracking data to predict serve effectiveness (points won in under four shots by the server) up to 10% more accurately than chance for first serves at the Australian Open.