Background Research

Original research is the process of investigating a subject for the first time or investigating it in a new way. The first step is determining what work has been conducted in the field - what other researchers have studied and how.

As we outlined in "Conducting Your Own Research Project", it was time for us to head for the library. We wanted to know what other researchers had accomplished in tennis science in the past. This would give us a better general understanding of tennis science, prevent us from "reinventing the wheel" by duplicating results that were already well-known, and avoid the problems other researchers may have experienced.

Researcher Tom Olsen, on the Cislunar staff, is also a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Davis in Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering. Tom had written a great deal of our "Aerodynamics in Sports" chapter in our on-line textbook and was quite familiar with the sports science journals.

A substantial body of academic work has been done in the last few decades covering numerous aspects of tennis, by researchers including chairman of the USTA sports science committee, Dr. Jack Groppel, the Australian researcher Prof. Bruce Elliott, and University of Pennsylvania physicist Howard Brody, among numerous other.

Many papers deal with aspects of the flight of the tennis ball, such as spin, the bounce on the court, and the biomechanics of the strokes that produce the initial flight and the changes in flight through the play of points.

Principal Investigator, Dr. Jani Macari Pallis, asked Tom to review all the academic work done on tennis science over the past 20 years. Quite a task! Clearly, research in tennis has been conducted over a much longer period of time. Would we miss anything by not going back more than 20 years? Maybe, maybe not.