🎾 Pt 3 - What happens at different levels of the competitive ladder — and how a player's skills shape the structure of a match.

This is the third in a series on differences in how tennis matches play out at different levels of the sport. I compare women’s and men’s recreational matches, Division 1 college matches, International Tennis Federation events, and WTA/ATP tour level events. Data can tell great stories: here’s one of them.

Rally Structure: How Long Are Points, Really?

If we zoom out from individual shots to the flow of entire rallies, a similar pattern emerges: as skill rises to the highest level, rallies become shorter. Triangulating results, this is also a function of the increased amounts of risk/reward that professionals need to balance. 

[Just note below that this might look a little different than other graphs out there where shot #1 is larger than shot #2. The first bar is 0 for double faults, and all service winners fall under shot #2 (return error) as I wasn’t able to disentangle true service winners from unforced return errors in the recreational data–and so I transformed the professional data for comparability.]

blue - shots 0-3 yellow - shots 4-6 green - shots 7-13 red - > 13

For women, 47 percent of WTA rallies end within three shots, compared with 35 percent at Division I and about 50 percent among 3.5/4.0 recreational players. In other words, pros might be far more aggressive than D1 players, but not much more “efficient” than 3.5/4.0 recreational players. And in the chart above, the green and red rallies >6 shots make up 18 percent of points for WTA matches versus 25 percent for D1 matches. While still dominated by shorter points, women’s D1 matches include longer rallies than either extreme of the skills spectrum. We can also just think about the average number of shots per point: 6.6 for D1 women compared to 4.8 for WTA professionals (more below). There’s some great analysis on rally length over at the Tennis Abstract.

blue - shots 0-3 yellow - shots 4-6 green - shots 7-13 red - > 13

[the data for ITF men are based on 6 matches and are provided for general interest but not used for analysis]

For men, the trend is similar but less pronounced. ATP players end nearly 50 percent of rallies within three shots, compared with 37 percent in Division I and 47 percent in 3.5/4.0 recreational matches. And in perfect symmetry with the women’s matches, long rallies (> 6 shots) again peak in college (25 percent) compared to the pro level (18 percent). This aligns with what we find above: for both genders rally ball winners and errors are ending points more often in D1 matches than in recreational or professional matches. 

What we’ll explore below supports the idea that the quality of groundstroke shot making increases faster than the quality of serves–creating slightly more shots per point and longer rallies at the D1 level. But when the quality of serving and the ability to hit winners increases dramatically at the professional level, both genders are capable of and are forced into ending points earlier.

Match Volume and Scoring: More Games, Shorter Points

I’ve been mixing and matching these two datasets very liberally so far, and here I have to mention a particular word of caution (to myself as well). The matches that recreational players choose to play can be shorter by convention. Most are two or three sets, but some are only 1 set, which obviously can bring down the average. The games, points, and shots per set should mostly be comparable, however, even though there might be some players choosing no-ad tennis or quick format sets.

Women
	sets	games per set	points per game	shots per point
Rec <=4.0	1.9	8.1	7.7	5.3
Rec	2.0	7.7	7.8	5.7
D1	2.2	8.7	6.0	6.6
ITF	2.2	8.8	6.6	5.2
WTA	2.3	9.3	6.6	4.8
Men
	sets	games per set	points per game	shots per point
Rec <=4.0	2.0	7.9	8.2	5.6
Rec	2.0	8.0	7.8	5.6
D1	2.1	8.7	5.8	6.7
ATP	2.7	9.8	6.2	4.8

Across both genders, the data show that in professional matches, players are consistently playing more games per set, while the number of points per game is the lowest in D1 matches and shots per point is its highest. These differences between levels are overwhelmingly statistically significant comparing one level to the next. At the recreational level, points per game are at their highest, indicating a lack of serving dominance by either player. While at the D1 level and as we saw above, even though the points per game are fewer, there are more shots per point (rally length). 

All of this hints at more groundstroke skill, especially for the returners who can more consistently keep balls in play (remember that previously we saw service winners and aces being fewer or staying stagnant as a share of all point outcomes through the D1 level?). This could be true even if servers overall (especially D1 men) are starting to enjoy an actual advantage from serving. But once again we see the ability and need to be more offensively minded hit a higher gear at each level of play.  

In the last installment, I’ll wrap this series up with some takeaways. In the meantime, I’m going to work on my +1.