Conducting Your Own Research Project

There are two major divisions in tennis science: the first deals with how the equipment behaves and the second with how the player behaves. Basically, the mechanics of the sports equipment and the mechanics and psychology of the player. "Mechanics" is a branch of physics which deals with the motion and the action of forces on an object. In tennis the mechanics of the sport deals with the behavior of the equipment: the ball bounce, the ball trajectory, the way the different racket components react on impact, how the ball behaves on different court surfaces. In "biomechanics" that object is a living organism and when we study biomechanics we're looking at the capabilities, limitations, and structure of that organism. In tennis, biomechanics is the study of how the player moves and interacts with the equipment. Additionally there is a separate field known as "sport psychology" which deals with how player behavior and thought influences performance.

You might want to try and look up tennis science, tennis physics or tennis biomechanics. But if you do not find anything - you might want to try two things: look up a broader, more general category or look up a similar category.

For example, instead of tennis biomechanics you might just look for a book on sport biomechanics. "Sport Biomechanics" would be a broader and more general subject and you would probably find a chapter on tennis in such a book.

Another example, would be to look up information on other ball sports. For example, we only found one paper on placing a tennis ball in a wind tunnel. It was an excellent paper but it didn't really include some of the information that we needed. So in addition to tennis we started to look at papers on wind tunnel tests of different sports balls - like baseballs, cricket balls and golf balls. In this case looking at a similar sport helped us find information that could help us with our experiment.

This happens very, very often in research. No one has solved the problem we are interested in, but they have solved a similar problem. It is considered an excellent skill to possess as a researcher to be able to take knowledge from one area and recognize that it applies to a different area. You may remember in Posing A Question that we mentioned that G. Warren Hall, NASA's Chief Test Pilot would tell his students "You will find that the same techniques will apply over and over again in other circumstances."