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Some of what looks like the limited serving success for volleyball players in the table is really strong teams’ overcoming the serving liability to withstand their opponents’ attacks and get the point. So the stronger teams get to serve more, which weighs their serving success more heavily than that of weaker teams. But in volleyball, the team that won the prior point gets to serve. That’s because the numbers are aggregated over all teams. But as tough as it looks for servers in volleyball, the numbers in the table slightly understate the challenge a typical volleyball server faces. Most serves don’t win the point outright, and when they don’t, the receiving team has three hits to control the ball, set it and smash it, and the sport has developed highly complex plays designed to win the point outright with its first possession. In volleyball, a point when you serve is considered one on which you’re playing defense. ( Table tennis doubles rules also restrict where the server can hit it.)
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And in neither sport is the server’s partner as likely to smash away an errant return as in tennis. So if your goal is to hit it where the returner isn’t, singles provides a big advantage. In table tennis, when playing singles you can serve to either side - left or right - on each point, which is not true in tennis.
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This is different from tennis because the serve functions differently in these sports. In both sports, servers do better in singles than in doubles. In badminton and table tennis, it doesn’t matter all that much who’s serving. Then come women’s singles and doubles, where the server’s advantage is slightly smaller because of returners’ comparative advantage in the women’s game. So at the very top of the server pyramid is men’s doubles, followed by mixed doubles - a man is serving in at least half of the games - and men’s singles. And the serve is more valuable in doubles than in singles, because the returner is trying to avoid the server’s partner and so has to aim for a narrower window than in singles. Within tennis, the serve is a bigger weapon for men than for women, in part because men are taller than women, on average, and so they can hit down on the ball with less risk. The sports divide into a few tiers of serving advantages. Tennis servers have an advantage at the 2016 Olympics volleyball servers don’tĢ016 Olympics data for matches from 2-3 days of preliminary and knockout play for each event In badminton and table tennis, it’s just a way to get the point started.
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The conclusion: In tennis, the serve is a weapon. I was looking for how often the player or team that serves ends up winning the point. 1 But after digging through PDFs and doing a lot of data entry and copy and pasting, I got data for hundreds of matches and thousands of points across 18 variations on the theme of serving. It turns out the data isn’t readily available. On a crucial point, as you watch the medal rounds of badminton and volleyball this weekend, would you rather see your team start with the ball or shuttlecock in its court or in its opponent’s? In each case, before a point can get underway, someone has to serve. In five Olympic sports, with medals in 18 events up for grabs, a net separates players from their opponents.