Bigger Balls May Slow Tennis Matches
Sept. 20 -- When Pete Sampras finishes off his opponents, he often does so in an efficient, rather uninteresting manner — he serves another ace.
Even Sampras admits his dominance can make his games somewhat clinical. “There was nothing dramatic about the match,” he told reporters after soundly defeating Martin Damm in this year’s U.S. Open.
Sampras’ blazing serves are exactly what the International Tennis Foundation (ITF) is hoping to tone down. Some believe the best way to increase exchanges and cut down the number of aces is to use a bigger ball. And new results from scientific studies in England suggest a new ball, which is 6 percent larger, has just that effect.
More Sweat Per Point
“The number of shots per point increased dramatically,” says Sean Mitchell, a sports technologist from Loughborough University in England who conducted tests on the new ball for the ITF. “We took that to mean that players were still matched the same, but they had to put more effort into each point because the serve was less dominant.”
The Loughborough study, which evaluated four men and four women college players, showed an overall increase in rallies among all the players when using the larger ball. And among the men in particular, the number of shots per point increased even more markedly, by 25 percent.
The oversized ball is 2.79 inches in diameter, compared with the conventional ball’s 2.63 diameter — about the difference between an apple and an orange. To make up for the larger size, the skin of the ball is slightly thinner so both balls weigh exactly the same. While thinner, the larger ball’s rubber covering is also slightly firmer, so each ball travels at the same rate from the racket. Where the balls differ is how fast they sail through the air and how they bounce once they strike the other side.
“The physics is simple, really,” says Steven Haake, a mechanical engineer at Sheffield University who studied the new ball’s movement. “The larger ball slows down in the air because it’s larger and has more drag.”
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