July 15 Mini-Mailbag

I’ve had a backlog of mailbag questions that I’ve been working on for a while. I was hoping to put them out as a big mailbag in the May Odd Week but then… VNL happened. So rather than keep trying to finish off that big mailbag post, I’m going to start dripping them out over the next few weeks a couple at a time. I usually put the mailbag behind the paywall, but in the interest of using the recommended Substack technique of free content previews to drive subscriptions sharing more content, I’ll put one in front of the paywall and one behind.

Previous Mini-Mailbag:

Mini-Mailbag

And here we go. Emailed question from an NCAA men’s coach:

Hey Joe, I had a statistical analysis question for you. Essentially I’m trying to figure out what the range/acceptable percentage is of how often we expect guys to miss on their second serve. Like are they 10% more likely to miss the second time around? I just charted first and second opportunities for a single match so it’s not a huge data sample. I didn’t look at 3 and beyond.

We made 84% of our first serves. Not too bad considering we only have 1 true float serve guy. We made 72% of our second serves. That’s a decent drop off, but again we’re looking at one match. I can certainly look at others. I was just curious you’re thoughts on it/if you’ve gathered some intel on that before.

Check this image courtesy of the great Nate Ngo

I don’t see a correlation between missed serves and run length. This coach was seeing that his servers are more likely to make their first serve than their second serves. I think that’s a reasonable hypothesis: guys are thinking more, “keep it in,” on the first serve and might be more aggressive the second time up. There also could be a fatigue element, although I wouldn’t think that would kick in on the second serve… maybe if you just played 4 intense rallies it might be harder to hit the fifth one in.

There’s also the line of thought that servers get on a roll and find their rhythm in subsequent serves.

Neither seemed to be the case in the Tokyo Olympics. Error % for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd serves are all virtually identical. 4th and 5th serves happened rarely enough that I wouldn’t look too much into those numbers.

This matches my experience with high-level servers. They have the ability to replicate their serve over and over again, regardless of conditions or situations. That’s what we want to be guiding our players toward.