Stated, Realized, and Optimal Aiming Strategies for the Tennis Serve: Experimental Evidence from Collegiate Athletes
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: We study how a player's execution error affects the optimal location at which to aim a serve in tennis. Aiming near the service-box boundaries makes a serve harder to return but increases the probability of a fault, creating a trade-off that depends on the player's execution error. Match-play data provide limited information about execution error because players' intended targets are unobserved. We conducted an experiment with Brigham Young University men's tennis players in which players explicitly identified targets they believed to be optimal for their serves. Players then served repeatedly toward their chosen targets, and we recorded the bounce locations. Using these data, we estimate player-specific execution error via a Bayesian hierarchical model that accounts for serves censored by net contact. These distributions define the transition dynamics of a two-period Markov decision process (MDP) representing a point in tennis, where the decision variables are the first- and second-serve aim locations. We solve the MDP for each posterior draw of the execution error distributions, yielding a posterior distribution over each player's optimal aim location. We find that players' stated targets are generally more aggressive than optimal, whereas their realized serve centers are more conservative and markedly closer to the optima.
Source: arXiv (Cornell University)
Institutions: Brigham Young University, Ultradent Products (United States)
Language: English
Subfield: Economics and Econometrics
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7171954749