Alright, so today I’m gonna walk you through my little project: trying to figure out John Isner’s serve speed. Sounds simple, right? Wrong.
It all started with me watching some tennis highlights. Isner’s serve is legendary, and I got curious about how fast it REALLY is. I mean, commentators throw around numbers, but I wanted to see if I could get close myself.
First thing I did, naturally, was hit up Google. I searched “John Isner serve speed record” and got a bunch of articles mentioning his fastest serve. Okay, cool, a starting point. But that’s just one serve, not his average, or how often he hits those speeds.
Next step: YouTube. I started digging through old matches, looking for serves where they showed the speed on screen. This was tedious. I mean, REALLY tedious. Fast forward, slow down, squint at the screen… I felt like a detective on a bad TV show.
I started noting down every serve speed I could find. I used a simple spreadsheet – nothing fancy, just serve number and speed. After a few hours of this, my eyes were burning, and I had a bunch of numbers. Averages, fastest, slowest… I even tried to calculate standard deviation (remember that from college?).
But the data was messy. Different cameras, maybe slightly off calibrations on the radar guns… ugh. So, I went back to the drawing board. I started focusing on specific tournaments where the broadcast quality and speed readouts seemed consistent. Wimbledon, US Open, that kind of thing.
I also tried to find patterns. Was he serving faster on first serves? On important points? Did his speed drop off later in matches? Some things seemed obvious (first serve usually faster), but others were harder to pin down.
I even tried to factor in things like wind conditions. If you watch enough tennis, you’ll notice that the wind can REALLY mess with a serve. But honestly, that was too complicated. I just made a mental note of really windy matches and tried not to rely too heavily on the speeds from those.
After a week of this, I had a pretty decent dataset. Not perfect, mind you, but good enough for my purposes. I figured out an average first serve speed that felt realistic. It wasn’t exactly the same as what the commentators always say, but it was in the ballpark.
The biggest takeaway? Data collection is a pain. But it’s also kinda fun. I definitely have a new appreciation for how hard it is to accurately measure things in sports. And I learned a little bit about John Isner’s serve in the process.
So, was it worth it? Maybe not in any practical sense. But hey, I had fun, and now I have a slightly more informed opinion about tennis. And that’s good enough for me.
