In recent decades, many courts, including the grass at Wimbledon and the indoor hard courts like the ones hosting the Nitto ATP Finals in Turin, Italy, have been drained of some of their speed.
One goal was reducing the wham-bam serve-and-volley style that had dominated the men’s tour, but was boring to television audiences, replacing it with the drama of hard-hitting baseline rallies enhanced by modern improvements in racket and string technology.
And yet …
Most rallies remain short. And winning those rapid-fire exchanges remains the most direct path to victory.
Since data started being kept in 2015, rallies lasting four shots or fewer typically account for close to 70 percent of every match, said Craig O’Shannessy, a strategy coach who has become a proselytizer for finishing points quickly. Rallies of five to eight shots account for around 20 percent, while only about 10 percent of points feature rallies lasting at least nine shots.
The most important revelation, he said, was the correlation between winning the quickies and winning matches. Across four 2015 Grand Slams and the 2016 United States Open, 91 percent of players who won the majority of shorter rallies won the match.
“This is the No. 1-indicator of winning and losing,” he said. (For women, who win fewer points on their serve, the correlation was still about 81 percent.)
By contrast, the player who dominated in the five-to-eight-shot category won the match 66 percent of the time, while winning nine-plus-points rallies led to victory only 55 percent of the time.
“The numbers are consistent,” O’Shannessy said. “If you don’t win the short points, you’re on the next plane out.”
Given those statistics, O’Shannessy argued that development for junior players and coaching in the pros should shift emphasis.
“The old way of training is to hit as many balls for as long a period as possible,” he said, but the serve, the return and even the next two shots are rarely hit from the baseline spots where players hit traditional rally balls.
Much of Roger Federer’s greatness stemmed from his ability to win service points quickly. O’Shannessy credited Federer with popularizing the serve-plus-one strategy. He was not an ace machine, but held serve more often because of a strong, well-placed serve that often yielded a weak return to midcourt he could pummel with his forehand.
O’Shannessy said Rafael Nadal then followed suit, and that O’Shannessy emphasized the two-shot strategy when he coached Novak Djokovic from 2017-19. “More players are now looking at the two-shot sequence rather than just trying to hit serves that don’t come back.”
Across the net, many Grand Slams have been won by the best returners, like Andre Agassi, Andy Murray, Nadal and Djokovic, said Tom Shimada, a coach at the Van Der Meer Tennis Academy in South Carolina.
Yet O’Shannesssy and Patrick McEnroe said that returning had long been the most neglected aspect of practice. McEnroe, a director at the John McEnroe Tennis Academy in New York, said that while practicing rallies was still necessary, now his school placed more emphasis on the serve return.
“For years, my brother would watch kids hitting ground strokes and say, ‘Why aren’t we serving and returning more,’” McEnroe said of the school’s namesake. “He wasn’t wrong.”
McEnroe said his school also placed more emphasis on the server driving the first shot after the return into the open court. That serve-plus-one shot is often overlooked, Shimada said, with high-level junior coaches too focused on getting serve mechanics perfect.
“You’re not going to always hit an ace, so you need to be ready for the first shot,” he said.
He wants more emphasis on the first four shots, but doesn’t want it to go too far. “I don’t want players forcing shots just to get it under the four-shot barrier or saying, ‘I don’t need to work on hitting 10 balls in a row because those points don’t matter.’”
Complicating things, O’Shannessy added, is that younger players, lacking serve power, must play longer rallies: only 55 percent of rallies in the 10- to 12-year-old matches end in four shots or less; the percentage creeps up with each age group through the college circuit. “You need to develop a more aggressive game as you get older, but it’s harder to move away from your winning style,” Shimada said.
O’Shannessy said ambitious junior players must start the transition around age 16 “when they’re strong enough to hit a better serve.”
At the professional level, Shimada said returners were usually defensive against the speed of first serves so they could earn more wins quickly by learning to attack second serves better.
“Additionally, if you start punishing the second serve, it puts more pressure on the other guy to make his first serve, and he may get tighter,” Shimada said.
McEnroe said the pros were adjusting. “We used to just practice serves, but now you see the men doing what the women have done for years — one guy serves while the other practices their return. And they’re doing it every day.”
O’Shannessy said awareness of the analytics had caused the average number of short rallies to dip by a percentage point or two because players now were preparing to defend against stronger opening salvos. “We shined a spotlight on this data so players understand it and are now surviving it more,” he said.
While winning in the first four shots is crucial, McEnroe argued that “you have to be smart about the analytics.”
He noted that against the world’s best players in a tournament like the ATP Finals, trying to win too quickly could cause its own problems.
“These guys bring the pressure to you, so you may try to do too much early in the point,” he said, explaining that trying to finish off an elite player in the first four shots on every point can cause a player to commit too many unforced errors.
Additionally, the greater importance of winning the shorter rallies can be rendered moot late in a set or match on a big point when Djokovic, Nadal or Daniil Medvedev go into “lockdown mode” and become relentless when that matters most.
“Of course those stats matter, but being a great tennis player means understanding what to do in crucial points,” he said. “Tennis is all about risk and reward, but it’s a fine line.”
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