Image Credits - Sky Sports
Having a lethal serve can be a huge advantage for a player as it can help the individual to hold the service games so that a few breaks here and there would be enough to get the win.
For example, America’s Frances Tiafoe used his powerful serves to good effect at this year’s US Open and defeated the mighty Rafael Nadal in the fourth round. While his game needs a little fine-tuning overall, his serves are one of the best at the moment, with a combination of accuracy and speed.
The youngster fired 91 aces in the six matches he played in the competition. He lost to eventual champion Carlos Alcaraz in the semifinal.
In a recent analysis, it can be seen that the mean serve speed for both men and women has gone up considerably in the last decade. The graph collected from Reddit is given below:
The 18-year-old Coco Gauff turned heads with a serve that clocked 128 mph during her second-round victory over Elena-Gabriela Ruse.
The youngster’s impressive serve was the second-fastest ever recorded in women’s US Open history. She was tantalizingly short of the record of 129 mph held jointly by Venus Williams and Alycia Parks.
“I’m not going for the fastest serve, to be honest. Sometimes I say, ‘Go hard, [into the] body,'” she told reporters after the 6-2, 7-6(4) victory.
“I did see the serve clock afterwards. Did see it said 128. I looked at it, and I was like, ‘Whoa.’ I don’t know how that happened. It didn’t feel like I hit it that hard. Sometimes, I feel like when you try to hit the serve hard, it still goes fast, but that was not supposed to be that hard.
“I looked at her after. I hit a couple of good serves that game in the 120s. She was laughing at her box. I was like, ‘I don’t know what’s going on either.”
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