Serena Williams Average Serve Speed
While tennis' top players have been spending this week making their final preparations for the upcoming 2017 Wimbledon Championships, one tennis commentator has been stirring up controversy.
#1: Serena Williams. Williams has the best first serve of any female tennis player ever. It regularly clocks in at well over 100 miles per hour, and she's third in the all-time list of fastest serves, having cranked one at 128.6 miles per hour at the 2013 Australian Open. Correct answers: 2 question: Serena Williams has an average serve speed of 47 m/s. Find the mass of the tennis ball if its kinetic energy is 65 J. The average first serve speed was 152 KM/H. Serena Williams holds the number one spot for fastest first serve during the tournament, followed by Bianca Andreescu (160.4) and Naomi Osaka (160.2). Though it differs from player to player, you can clearly see that players aim for the wide and centre serve locations to gain a competitive advantage. 4: Serena Williams (207.0kph/128.6mph) The 23-time Grand Slam champion didn’t just hit one 128.6-mile-an-hour serve at the 2013 Australian Open—she hit two of them. The first one came as she. Get the latest news on Serena Williams including her, stats, videos, and more at the official Women's Tennis Association website.
In a recent interview with NPR, 7-time Grand Slam champion John McEnroe inexplicably took a shot at 23-time Major winner Serena Williams when he opined that she would be ranked only 700— a Futures-level player—if she played on the men’s tour.
McEnroe’s comments continue a string of headline-grabbing chauvinistic behavior among some of the sport’s most well-known retired players that includes Ilie Nastase and Raymond Moore. The fact that this came from one of the most popular commentators in the sport is a sad reminder that, although tennis is considered one of the most equal of sports, it still has a long way to go to eliminate gender bias.
Even more frustrating is the reality that many tennis fans are likely to agree with McEnroe’s comments, however unfounded and baseless they may be. So, as much as the rest of us would like the “Battle of the Sexes” to be a ghost of tennis' past, McEnroe’s comments have reawakened the gender debate and necessitates a response.
McEnroe’s point-of-view is based on the premise that the physicality of men’s tennis is so far superior to women’s tennis that even the undeniable GOAT of women’s tennis wouldn’t be able to make it at the tour-level.
Is there any evidence to justify this perspective?
The most obvious place to look is the serve. This is not only the most important part of the game but it is also the one skill where the physical differences between men and women are most notable. While many professional women players keep pace and even exceed men’s groundstroke speeds, their power on serve is generally 15% less than that of similarly ranked men.
But Serena Williams is another story all together. Below, I’ve compared Serena’s service speeds at the Australian Open between 2013 to 2017 against the first round men’s players in the same years, which would represent the top 100 male players on the tour. On first serve, men hit at around 180 kph on average, while Serena’s average is 170 kph, just 5% under the typical top 100 male player.
Moreover, Serena’s 90% interval directly overlaps with the top 100 male servers. This tells us that there would rarely be a Serena serve whose power wasn’t competitive with the best male players in the world.
But one could correctly argue that speed is only one ingredient of a successful serve. Placement is also critical.
As part of my role in the Game Insight Group at Tennis Australia, we have used a number of years of tracking data to create a dictionary of shots based on their speed, location, and shape. Our dictionary gives us a precise description of the distinct shots in the professional game. One of the most interesting we can do with this dictionary is to look at how often a player uses each type of shot and create a style profile from their shot “vocabulary”.
I can also see how often a female player uses the shot types in the men’s game and, in this way, determine how similar her style is to any of the male players based on the detailed physical features of her shots.
What does this method tell us about the similarity of Serena Williams' first serve style compared to top male players?
The chart below shows clusters of service styles among top male players. The closer two players are in the tree and the deeper the branch separating them, the more similar their playing styles. You can see, for example, that Roger Federer, Novak Djokovic, and Stan Wawrinka are all in the same style cluster.
Most interesting to the present story is where Serena Williams is placed. A player who could not compete with these ATP players would be an outlier even more extreme than outliers like Dudi Sela. But Williams is square in the center of a cluster that includes Andreas Seppi and Richard Gasquet, both top 20 players. This gives the most convincing rebuff of McEnroe’s assertion. Far from being a 700-level player, Serena Williams has the power and serving style that is equal to top 30 male players.
These numbers satisfyingly show that McEnroe’s comments were off base but I long for the day when rebuttals like this are no longer necessary. No one would challenge Roger Federer’s achievements because he might not be able to dunk on LeBron James. If men’s tennis is judged on its own merits, women’s tennis deserves that same.
Last night Serena Williams obliterated World Number 4 Agnieszka Radwanska 6-0, 6-3 in the semifinals of the Miami Premier Mandatory. The fourth best player offered such little resistance to one of the all-time greats of women’s tennis that it even felt like the final score could’ve been even more lopsided.
Before the match started, I decided to track Serena’s forehands and backhands, just to get a glimpse at what her Efficiency Ratings were on both wings. As you might recall, I did the same thing for Maria Sharapova during her quartefinal match against Sara Errani. Just as a reference, here is how the Forehand and Backhand Efficiency Ratings are calculated:
Forehand Efficiency rating = (Total Attempted Forehands – Forehand Unforced Errors)/Total Attempted Forehands
Backhand Efficiency Rating: (Total Attempted Backhands – Backhand Unforced Errors)/Total Attempted Backhands
Average Female Tennis Serve Speed
As the match started, Radwanska seemed to be more nervous than usual. The top Polish tennis player was struggling to get first serves in play (midway through the first set her first serve percentage was below 40%). Serena Williams, on the other hand, was fully focused on the task at hand: she played one of the most controlled and efficient sets of tennis I’ve seen in recent times. The result was a most emphatic bagel.
Here is my first set scorecard:
Per usual, the blue highlight on games 2, 4 and 6 indicate that Serena broke Radwanska’s serve in those games. Here are a few interesting things about that set:
– Notice that the 15-time Slam champion didn’t have to hit more than 9 groundstrokes in any of those six games, which is astounding (remember, first serve returns don’t count as groundstrokes in this analysis).
– It’s also interesting that Serena hit seven more backhands than forehands throughout the set.
Here are the Unforced Errors (via TennisTV) and Efficiency Ratings for the younger Williams sister:
As you might recall, Serena’s Efficiency Ratings closely resemble what Maria Sharapova achieved during the first set against Errani the other day (Sharapova had an 86% Forehand Efficiency Rating and a 94% Backhand Efficiency Rating). However, Sharapova had to hit 71 more forehands and 53 more backhands to get those numbers…and she had to scrape through a hard-fought 7-5 set.
Isn’t it shocking how efficient Serena Williams is? Here’s another clue:
As you can see, Serena Williams had to hit only 25 groundstrokes to hold serve three times. That’s an average of a little over 8 groundstrokes per game. And since you have to win at least four points to win a game, we can say that Serena had to hit only about 2 groundstrokes per point during her service games during that set.
That is just astounding.
While I was collecting this information, I couldn’t help but wonder at how incredible Serena Williams’ serve is. It’s about five or six steps above everyone else on the WTA. Not only does she rack up the aces, but she gets a good number of service winners in. And if the returner somehow gets the serve back in play, Serena more often than not has great looks at relatively simple putaways. It’s the complete package.
Just look at the stats from that first set:
That’s just brutal. 2 out of 3 serves in that set were first serves, and Serena won 82% of the points played with her first delivery. She added 4 aces and didn’t commit a single double fault.
Serena Williams Average First Serve Speed
Really, tennis efficiency doesn’t get any better than that. And what is scary is that Serena wasn’t even pushing that hard: she was just picking her spots with clinical precision, and not going for more than she needed to. Winning that set seemed like the easiest thing in the world. Everything about it made perfect sense.
Now, what happened in the second set? Let’s check the scorecard:
A few things things stand out:
– Serena went from hitting 7 more backhands than forehands in the first set to hitting 22 more forehands than backhands in the second set. That’s pretty significant, no? You can see a tactical adjustment from Radwanska, who knows that even though Serena’s forehand is a fierce weapon, the World Number One was more likely to make errors off that wing than off her incredibly solid backhand.
– You can also see that in the second game of the set (a Radwanska service hold), this trend of making Serena hit significantly more forehands than backhands resulted in the first game won by the former Ninja of the WTA. It also resulted in Serena having to hit one fewer groundstroke than in all of her first set service games combined (24 to 25) and coming out of the game empty-handed. .
– Look at the sixth game, when Serena Williams finally got the break she was looking for: she did it with only 3 groundstrokes (again, first serve returns don’t count as groundstrokes). I actually went back and looked at this game again, just to double-check the numbers. That’s another aspect of Serena’s efficiency: her impressive return game.
You can see it in action during matches: Serena Williams will be looking to do heavy damage off of most of her returns of serve. She loves to hit returns into the open court, as well as with a wicked angle. She is always looking to inject a lot of pace – sometimes hitting a return at a higher speed than the serve itself. What is fascinating is that the whole process doesn’t seem reckless. Such is Serena Williams’ control off both wings.
– You can see that even though Serena played one more return game in the second set than she did in the first (and also played that long 2nd return game), she ended up hitting just 5 more groundstrokes on her second set return games than in her first set return games. So even if she didn’t end up breaking Radwanska’s serve more than once, Serena didn’t spend all that much energy in those return games anyway.
Now, how did the serve fare in the second set? Serena added 8 more aces, and just a single double fault (in the last game of the match, too). Her first serve percentage dipped slightly, but she increased her percentage of points won with it (to 84%). She also increased her percentage of points won with her second serve, from 50% in the first set to 60% in the second.
So, her serving efficiency actually went up. Why did this set become more of a contest? Let’s look at the unforced error count, as well as the Efficiency Ratings:
As you can see, Serena Williams committed far more forehand unforced errors in that second set (she only committed 4 in the first set), while she actually had fewer backhand unforced errors. However, as I mentioned above, Serena hit significantly more forehands than backhands in that second set (22 more). Hence, her Forehand Efficiency Rating went down.
Here you can see an interesting pattern during the first five games of the second set:
You can see that in the first five games (which included 3 Serena service games and 2 return games), Venus’ younger sister hit a combined 21 more forehands than backhands. She had to work harder to hold, and even though she put a lot of work into at least one of those return games, she didn’t break serve. It’s interesting to note that in the next four games combined, the differential between forehands and backhands would just be +1 in favor of the forehand.
Now let’s step back a little and look at the final match stats:
Let’s add the following numbers to Serena’s final tally: 12 aces, just 1 double-fault, 64% of first serves in, 83% of first serve points won. Serena hit 15 forehand winners, and 11 backhand winners. Her total number of winners, 40 (which includes aces and overheads, the latter of which I don’t tally as groundstrokes), is greater than the number of points won by Radwanska throughout the match (37).
As a quick comparison, let’s go back to that Sharapova-Errani match. The Russian had to hit 189 groundstrokes to win the first set, as well as 164 to win the second set.
Last night, Serena Williams only had to hit just 157 groundstrokes to win the entire match.
If that’s not efficiency, I don’t know what is.