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

Abstract

Available research analysing the playing structure in kids tennis on different scaled courts identifies a severe problem at the transition from the U9 (Orange stage) to the U10 (Green stage), which can mainly be reasoned by the enlargement of the court from a small-sided field to the full-sized court. Aware of this problem, an intermediate stage, called Lime Court (stage), between Orange and Green was introduced in Austria. The study at hand aims to compare the playing structure between the Green and the Lime Court in kids' tennis aged 9-10 years (U10). Twelve videos from matches on Lime in 2013 were analysed and compared to the results found in 2014. The playing structure was defined by 18 performance parameters. The differences in the mean values as well as one-way ANOVA were calculated between the groups. The results found in the study lead to the conclusion that the Lime Court enables children to play more similar to elite players than the Green Court. Thus, Lime closes the existing gap between the Tennis10s stage Orange and Green and should be used for 10-year old tennis players in order to properly develop their playing skills.

Effect of Modification Rules in Competition on Technical–Tactical Action in Young Tennis Players (Under-10)

“…The distance reduction between the baseline and the net can explain this behavior besides the reduction in net height (Timmerman et al, 2015;Limpens et al, 2018). Another result shows that the predisposition of playing inside the court can be because the court size is too large, not adapting to the children's characteristics in GC, as shown by Bayer et al (2017) and Ebert (2012).…”

“…The lack of learning opportunity and success were clearly observed when analyzing the serve in GC, particularly when comparing the number of the second serves between competitions (number of second serve is lower in MC). Some studies indicate that one of the most important constraint stroke in the teaching-learning process is the serve on the following formative stages: (a) Red stage (Fitzpatrick et al, 2017); and (b) Green stage (Schmidhofer et al, 2014;Timmerman et al, 2015;Bayer et al, 2017;Fitzpatrick et al, 2017;Limpens et al, 2018), Another finding in MC was that serves success improves when net height and court dimensions decreasing, these results match with other studies (Bayer et al, 2017;Limpens et al, 2018). In this line, the analysis of landing locations of serve in both competitions does not show significant differences, furthermore was observed no preferences between landing locations of serve.…”

“…The lack of technical-tactical actions close to the net (volleys and smash) in both competitions is noteworthy, which shows a lack of training using these technical-tactical resources. However, there are studies with the best children's tennis players in which no volleys were observed in MC than in GC, because of the reduction of net height and court dimensions (Timmerman et al, 2015;Bayer et al, 2017;Fitzpatrick et al, 2017). The main explanations in this study for the technical-tactical actions scarcity near the net could be the lack of experience, lack of training, or even insecurity in volleys, although there was a greater opportunity to hit the ball in areas close to the net in MC (Figure 2).…”

“…Competition is a dynamic and complex formative environment if it is accurately conducted at early training stages because of its multidimensional effect on many factors (Schmidhofer et al, 2014;Bayer et al, 2017;Krause et al, 2019). In recent years, there has been an increasing amount of literature about the research topic in the following sports: (a) tennis (Bayer et al, 2017;Fitzpatrick et al, 2017;Limpens et al, 2018); (b) basketball (Ortega et al, 2015); (c) soccer (Casal et al, 2017;Ortega-Toro et al, 2018); (d) handball ; (e) cricket (Elliott et al, 2005;Harwood et al, 2018;Takamido et al, 2019); (f) rugby (Bennett et al, 2016;Morley et al, 2016;Elliott et al, 2019); (g) volleyball (Gillham and Gut, 2012); and (h) flag football (Burton et al, 2011a). Overall, these studies highlight that the need for adapting competition at early training does not provide an integral development of young athletes (Burton et al, 2011b;Ortega et al, 2015;Buszard et al, 2016;Gonçalves et al, 2016;McCarthy et al, 2016).…”

“…In this sense, few studies have objectively analyzed the actual impact of these scaled competitions in tennis (Schmidhofer et al, 2014;Bayer et al, 2017). The research has mostly focused the analyses on two factors: (a) reducing court dimensions and (b) decreasing net height to identify the leading constraints approach in the Green stage (Schmidhofer et al, 2014;Kachel et al, 2015;Buszard et al, 2016;Bayer et al, 2017). However, far too little attention has been paid to analyzing total technical-tactical actions to identify task constraints in competitions holistically (Torres-Luque et al, 2017).…”