FALL 2025

AUTHORS

Yijia Chen, Nanjing Foreign Language School
Nicole Lin, South Hills Academy
Harry Wieand, Boston University Academy
Jason Zhou, Wilbraham Monson Academy

ABSTRACT

Tennis is one of the few sports in which the server initiates every point, making the serve the only stroke entirely under a player’s control. A powerful, well-placed serve can create immediate advantages, but identifying which characteristics most effectively translate serves into winning points remains unclear.

Using point-by-point data from the U.S. Open men’s singles (2018—2019; 2021—2024), we evaluate how first-serve speed, accuracy, and spatial variation (serve-location entropy) shape point outcomes. Regression results show that speed has the strongest relationship with serve efficiency, while accuracy in the service box and variation in serve location have smaller but still statistically significant associations. In out-of-sample tests with an 80/20 train–test split, our model achieves a root mean squared error (RMSE) of 0.066 (vs. a SD of 0.084 for observed outcomes) and a correlation of r = 0.39 between predicted and actual outcomes.

Overall, serve speed has the strongest relationship with serve efficiency, followed by accuracy and unpredictability.