A Gender Gap in Tennis Serving Strategy: What College and Recreational Data Tell Us

A Persistent Pattern Across All Levels

Research published in 2023 found that men’s professional tennis players served more like pure theory would predict than women. For pro women's first serves in particular, the researchers showed that 45% of the time women demonstrated different win percentages when serving to their opponents’ left and right sides, compared to essentially never for pro men.

Does This Pattern Hold at Lower Levels?

At Next Level Stats, we partnered with SwingVision to analyze an amazingly rich dataset of recreational and college matches and explore whether this gender difference exists at less skilled levels of the game—and the answer appears to be yes, but with a twist.

Pro data from Gauriot et al. (2023) and D1 and recreational analysis by Next Level Stats and data from SwingVision

Why Might This Be?

The earlier researchers thought that this gender difference might relate to the importance of the serve. In men's pro tennis, players win 64% of first serve points, while in women's tennis they win only 58%. The faster serves and higher overall winning percentages mean that serves are more “valuable” or more likely to win men a point than women. Therefore, their theory goes, men might have extra incentive to make sure they’re maxing out their serve, including by equalizing their chances of winning whether hitting to the returner’s left or right.

This explanation could easily apply to men’s and women’s tennis at the recreational level as well. But when we dug into the data, we found the opposite…. Recreational men demonstrate different serve percentages to their opponents’ left and right 56% of the time on first serves, while recreational women didn’t demonstrate a measurable difference at all! And at the college level, neither men nor women did for first serves.

So What Does It All Mean?!?

Now this is speculation rather than hard stats, but it’s very plausible that neither recreational men nor women serve equally “well” to the returner’s left and right sides. But for recreational players (NTRP 3.5 - 5.0 in the SwingVision dataset) the serve matters somewhat more for men where they hold serve 53% of the time compared to women at 47% (which is not quite statistically significant with a z score of 1.61 and p value = 0.107). So even for recreational men, that lack of parity matters. And for rec women, serves just get the point started and have little bearing on who wins the point.

Whatever the reason behind the differences, this new data source reveals an exciting insight for us mere mortals of the game: learning how to serve well makes you a better tennis player :)