MELBOURNE, January 21, 2020 (Australian Open Press Release)

Australian Open 2020 will unveil a new statistic to measure the value of the most important shot in tennis…the serve. 

The new Serve Value is a measure devised by the Game Insight Group (GIG) – a joint venture between Tennis Australia and Victoria University. 

Serve Value measures the quality of a player’s serve that rates its combined speed, spin and placement on a 0-100 scale, where most aces score close to 100 and most serves that land in the middle of the service box at low speeds register scores closer to 0. 

“We wanted to find a way to more easily differentiate serve quality for fans, players and coaches alike,” Tennis Australia Head of Innovation Dr Machar Reid explained. 

“The beauty of the measure is that it also allows us to get at the quality of the second serve in a unique way.

“As a sport, we’re immediately drawn to the power of the first serve but have struggled to fully capture the magic of players’ second serves. Through serve value, we’re able to do that for the first time.”

Victoria University Professor of Sports Analytics Sam Robertson added, “Using science to measure speed is easy, using science to measure the value of a shot not so much. Serve value brings tennis in line with many other major sports who are developing new and informative ways to quantify the skill of its players”.

The highest serve values recorded on Day 1 were:

·       96 from Sam Querrey (USA)

·       87 from Serena Williams (USA)

Check out Serve Value on the Match Beats section of ausopen.com provided by Infosys.