Quantifying the nature of anticipation in professional tennis

Abstract

We quantify the nature and frequency of anticipation behaviours in professional tennis using video coding of incidents where the time delay between the opponent's stroke and the reaction of the player were recorded. We argue that anticipation is based on uncertain information and should lead in some situations to erroneous decisions. We identified the transition between reaction (with 100% accuracy in the selection of where the ball is played on the court) and anticipation (with less than 100% accuracy) as being 140–160 ms after ball contact. Anticipation behaviours occurred on between 6.14% and 13.42% of the coded situations. These anticipation behaviours appeared almost exclusively in ‘unfavourable’ situations, where the opponent had a significant tactical advantage, with the type of playing surface having only a limited effect. Moreover, the decrease in accuracy with shorter response times is not monotonic, with an increase in response accuracy being observed for times shorter than 120 ms before ball contact. We propose that very early anticipation behaviours occur when players use significant context-specific information before the opponent's stroke. When such information is not available, players produce anticipation behaviours that are closer to the moment of ball–racket contact using information that is more likely to be based on the opponent's preparation of the stroke. This study opens new directions for research focusing on the testing and training of anticipation in fast ball sports.

Keywords:

• ball sports
• expertise
• perception
• prediction

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by ANR (Agence Nationale de la Recherche) within the framework of the project Blan06-1_134792. We would like to thank Yves Guiard for helpful discussion on this study and Vincent Déchelette for providing the tennis video clips used in this study. We also would like to thank Dartfish France which provided us a free access to their software for the analyzes of the video clips.

Notes

*This author is currently affiliated to Centre for Sports Medicine and Human Performance, School of Sport and Education, Brunel University, Uxbridge, Middlesex, UK, UB8 3PH