Our Research Project - Experiment Reports

At The
U.S. Open
(Page 10)

First Viewings

The first footage confirmed everything the team had seen in the California test. The camera was able to count ball spin, and film extremely clear images of the biomechanics of the players. Everyone was very excited and pleased. The team showed footage to most of the the USA team, including reporters Michael Barkam and Pam Shriver. USTA Driector of Sports Science Paul Roetert made a trip to the USA trailer to see early footage, as did other Sports Science Committee members including noted sports psychologist Jim Loehr.

John was very interested to do a preliminary onsite analysis of the ball spin in professional tennis, something that had never been measured. To facilitate this, the team had brought an additional SVHS tape deck from California. Doing frame by frame analysis, he began counting the spin on the strokes of players such as Pete Sampras, Andre Agassi, Martina Hingis and Venus Williams.

He also began to transfer using the high speed digital deck. It was at this point the team noticed a puzzling and potentially very troubling problem. The spin rates were different depending on which deck the team used to count them! When he transfered examples of the footage using the high speed system, the numbers were different than he had obtained when doing his analysis on the extra SVHS viewing deck.

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