We still talk about tennis. And much more.
https://talkabouttennis2.com/
Something to keep an eye on for the NA hardcourt season: At the USO last year, 1st serve%s dipped (down to 57%) and double fault rates skyrocketed (close to Medvedev's seasonal average) due to the hard-to-control balls being used. This trend appears to be repeating itself in Canada so far.
Discussion
If you look at the completed ATP matches so far there are a ton of sub-60% 1st serve rates
Iga Swiatek in her interview on Roddick's podcast also said that the balls seem much lighter to her when practicing with them and that they're much harder to control
This also has rallying implications as well because the Cincy/USO balls last year tended to not take spin very well at all which was part of the reason certain high ranked players had massive issues keeping it in play
At first it might seem like grasping at straws but there have been some pretty clear massive swings in results among even high ranked players with different ball conditions and Iga outright said it herself
Available-Gap8489
•
2h ago
Delbonis ball toss + Cressy second serve. Love chaos
Profile Badge for the Achievement Top 1% Commenter Top 1% Commenter
The full quote (in English originally without translating it back to English) provides more context here.
It seems like the balls are a lot more lively than the “dead” balls that have been the norm for so long. Fritz also talks about the speed of the court being a factor.
“Q. Quite a few players have been having struggles landing returns, it seems like. Whether or not that's a conditions issue, court, ball, whatever, adjustments at the beginning of the hard court swing, all that. What's your take on that, and what adjustments have you made from DC to kind of improve that shot?
TAYLOR FRITZ: You said returns? To be honest, I feel like it's everything since being here. Yesterday was the first practice I had since being here that I actually felt like I could, like genuinely I felt like I knew where the ball was going to go off my racquet.
I've been having an incredibly hard time just putting the ball in the court. Typically when I'm missing shots I know exactly why I'm missing, I know what I did wrong. The first couple days I was here, and even in my first round match, there's balls going 10 feet long that feel exactly the same as the one that was just right before that went in.
So I just felt like in general the conditions are, it's been really hard to just play good tennis. I think there's a lot of ugly tennis. There's a lot of people double faulting, a lot of mistakes.
I think it's two things. I think these balls are for sure the hardest balls to control that we play with all year, the Wilson U.S. Opens. And they're not bad, it's just the balls that we've been playing with on tour for the last couple years consistently the most, they're just really soft and more dead. So they slow down off the bounce, they hold on your strings longer, there's just like a more soft, dead ball we play with. You play with these, they shoot off your racquet, they jump off the court faster.
And then this court's very fast compared to, I thought DC was pretty fast, this is faster coming through the court even more. It's just tough to control, for sure. Someone hits a really big, flat ball into you, it's tough to just play it back into the court.”
Harri Heliovaara also said about the balls in his blog (this I have to autotranslate from Finnish)
“And somehow the ball behaves incredibly lively, as if the pressure inside the ball was twice as high as in Finland. The court surface is scorching hot and the playing conditions are therefore incredibly fast. Nothing helps to secure a shot or it immediately runs away long. Similarly, lobs never seem to land before the end of the stroke. The very heavy Wilson US Open Extra Duty balls certainly play a part in that, but I spent a few days wondering if I could even find any kind of control when hitting.”
Available-Gap8489
•
1h ago
Delbonis ball toss + Cressy second serve. Love chaos
Profile Badge for the Achievement Top 1% Commenter Top 1% Commenter
That’s how I interpreted it.
Harri also mentioned (I think in the blog post following this one) that he made his string tension higher and that seemed to help….so I do think players will adjust as they still have time before the USO.
It also seems like the fast courts are a factor, and temperature (it was really hot in Toronto for the first couple of days) would also impact the speed of the court/how the balls play.
