[Looking for] Tennis serves speed in the Grand Slam tournaments

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Hi all,
I am a new curious member.

I am working on a self-initiated project for my last month internship at Interactive Things.
I am investigating tennis serves speed and, more specifically, I have limited my area of research to the Grand Slam tournaments.

I would like to visualise the evolution of players’ serves speed over time. Therefore it would be ideal to cover a time span of roughly 10years (the most recent in time, the better) and to obtain information (and data) about:

  • men’s singles fastest serve speed leaders
  • women’s singles fastest serve speed leaders
    I am able to obtain data and information about the 2016 Grand Slam, but the more I go back in time, the more information scarcity I face.

Do you have any good references/sources where I could find more data about this subject? Or, do you (or your contacts) know more about this and would you be interested to share your knowledge with me?

Thanks in advance,
Greta

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Hey Greta, thanks for dropping by & sharing your interest in tennis data. You might have already seen that there is a fan-run site at http://tennis-data.co.uk which has scores from Grand Slams going back 10 years or more. However, I am not sure whether the “serve speed leaders” are included. They did publish to the Open Sports DataHub, so may be willing to help point you in the right direction.

Otherwise, a few quick searches do seem to suggest there is academic interest (edu.au) as well as relevant wiki pages. Where would the “best source of data” be? Not knowing any better, I’d suppose it was Infosys / ATP, who interestingly enough mention open source in their press releases, but leave me uncertain about their data release policy.

Good luck with the search; there are other folks in the open (sports) data community who may wish to expand on this.

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Hey Oleg,

thanks for these great resources. I have read the academy papers and scanned briefly some other sources, but I will carefully look into all the others that you have linked.
By researching further, and supported by great help, I have found this github repository by JeffSackmann, an expert author who has worked in the fields of sports statistics. I think this could be a great starting point.

Till the next update.
Thanks again!

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