At The Sybase Open (Page 1)

Sometimes research in one area leads to unexpected, and exciting new developments in other related areas. This was certainly the case with our project! When you start to investigate something that fascinates you, there is often no way to predict where that investigation will eventually lead.

Project Manager John Yandell's curiosity regarding the science of tennis led him to the K-8 Aeronautics Internet Textbook (K8AIT) project on the World Wide Web and the beginning of the collaboration with Dr. Jani Macari Pallis of Cislunar Aerospace on our research project.

At that time John was working on a study of ball speed in pro tennis. As tennis coach at University High School in San Francisco, John heard through one of his students, that a physics teacher there, Nasif Iskander, had helped him with a project designed to study the speed of the puck in hockey. Was there a similar way, John wondered, to study the speed of the ball in pro tennis?

Everyone who watches tennis on television knows that the radar guns give the velocity of the serve. What many fans don't realize, however, is that the radar guns measure only the highest velocity the ball achieves, which is shortly after it leaves the strings of the racket. What happens to the speed of the ball as it travels toward the receiver? And what are the speeds of the other shots in tennis besides the serve - the return of serve, for example, or the forehand and backhand groundstrokes? What about the volleys, and the overhead?

Some of the top men's players hit serves that reach a maximum speed of 130 MPH, or even 140 MPH. But how does that kind of top speed compare with a shot such as the dropshot, which the players hit as softly as possible to bounce out of an opponent's reach? In other words, what was the real range and variety of speeds in the pro game?