A comparison between the structure in elite tennis and kids tennis on scaled courts (Tennis 10s)

A comparison of the playing structure in elite kids tennis on two different scaled courts

“…The tests for significance were performed with the software SPSS 22.0. There were three test groups that were compared to each other: ATP, Lime and Greenwhereby the ATP and Green data originated from the Schmidhofer et al (2014) study and the Lime data was collected specifically for this study. The differences between the mean values for each parameter and group were analysed via one-way ANOVA with p < .05.…”

“…The videos were used by an operator to observe and manually annotate the investigated performance parameters ( Table 2). The basic observation system and concept of analysis were borrowed from Schmidhofer et al (2014), but there are few alterations concerning the performance parameters: the parameter Return Points Won was not used because it just represents the counterpart of Serve Points Won. For specific service analyses, the parameters 1st Serve Points Won (%) and 2nd Serve Points Won (%) were combined to Total Serve Points Won (%), which is an overall indicator of the effectiveness of the serve.…”

“…It was officially launched in 2012 as part of the Austrian Tennis System (Table 1), but it is not part of the ITF Tennis 10s. This study bases on the results of Schmidhofer et al (2014) and extends the investigations to the Lime Court by applying nearly the same performance parameters. With this, we examine if the Lime Court is a solution to bypass the undesired effects in the playing structure emerging at the transition from Orange to Green tennis.…”

“…The article at hand takes a closer look at the Tennis 10s' transition from the Orange to the Green Court, which was proved to be inappropriately for the children's development by Schmidhofer et al (2014). As described above, the courts sizes change inadequately between Green and Orange, which can be expressed by the ratios between the court dimensions and the average body heights of the kids (Table 1).…”

“…At the age of 11, moon balls occur very rarely due to the aligned proportions between the players' body sizes and the court dimensions. Schmidhofer, Leser, and Ebert (2014) discussed a couple of other negative effects of disproportionately large courts and showed that the playing structure of U10 kids playing on the Green Court differs from (adult) ATP tennis more than U9 tennis on the Orange Court and U12 tennis on the regular court (Figure 1). The figure merges twelve analysed performance indicators to six basal parameters.…”