The psychological (ab)use of timeouts in professional tennis

Liam P. Blything, Ryan Blything

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

The (ab)use of timeouts as a tool for swinging momentum is a long-standing psychological question in tennis. We provided the first real-world quantitative investigation of this, through an archival analysis of bathroom timeouts taken between sets in professional tennis matches [timeout N = 366 following stringent data preprocessing of confounds]. Our study revealed three key findings. First, the majority of bathroom timeouts were taken by players who lost the prior-set, suggesting that the decision to take a timeout is triggered by negative momentum. Second, the likelihood of recovering from a lost set to win the next set was greater after a bathroom timeout, relative to stringently controlled baseline data where no timeouts were taken. Third, follow-up analyses on the extent to which unforced-errors contributed to the forms of points won and lost, indicated that the timeout advantage is a combination of both the strategist benefitting from the opportunity to personally reset, and a disruption of the rhythm of the opponent, rather than being disproportionally driven by one player. Together, these pioneering findings uniquely inform players and tennis governing bodies about the influence of timeouts and, more broadly, elucidate the role that stoppages can play in sport for altering momentum.
Original languageEnglish
Number of pages19
JournalInternational Journal of Performance Analysis in Sport
Early online date8 Dec 2024
DOIs
Publication statusE-pub ahead of print - 8 Dec 2024

Bibliographical note

Copyright © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.

Keywords

  • Performance
  • timeouts
  • momentum
  • gamesmanship
  • stoppages

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