ABSTRACT
The importance of the service in winning matches is one of the major factors in today’s competitive tennis. Considering the velocity of serves, between 191 km.h-1 and 206 km.h-1 for the best professional tennis players in 1991 (Parier, 1992), the receiver must plan the response before the opponent actually hits the ball. This characteristic has been discovered by observing sudden preparatory adjustements in the receiver at the time of the opponent’s stroke (Keller et al., 1987). In order to put this behaviour into practice, the player supposedly uses cues from the server before the ball is put into motion (Keller, 1985), which allows him to foresee its future trajectory (Jones and Miles, 1978). In order to complete this research, a series of studies was devoted to determine the nature of the information used by the receiver to dispel uncertainty about the opponent’s serve. Collected cues regarding the position of the ball, the racket and the server at the time of the stroke are selected as pertinent to the identification of the nature and direction of the serves (Goulet et al., 1988, 1989). It appears that none of the cited works clearly show how these cues are used. The collecting of cues about the server’s behaviour is not the only information category the receiver can use to plan the response. The use of a probability type of approach underlines the fact that the choice of strong first serve and a softer second serve is not systematically the best one throughout the whole course of a match (Bartoszynki and Puri, 1981; Norman, 1985). Lastly, the quality of the serve also seems to vary according to the court surface (Hughes and Clarke, 1995). However, these data remain very individual and cannot be perceived by the receiver as they are.
