How can you do an at-home expiriment to see how fast your serve goes?

Question

How can you do an at-home expiriment to see how fast your serve goes? If you can give me some ideas, I'd really appriciate it! Thanks!

Answer 1

If you are talking about internet access, www.toast.net has a speed test.

Answer 2

It's kind of stupid what I'm going to say, but if you can, you might one to do push-ups with one hand, the one you serve with. The stronger your arms are, the more force you put, and the faster it might go. =) Don't you think?

Answer 3

you can go outside, like in your backyard, and have someone catch the ball while you serve from the opposite end.  you can try different serves and see which seems to work better and which ones are faster. have the other person time your serves.

Answer 4

good question

Answer 5

You could have someone time you with a stopwatch and then do the math, but they'd better have really good reflexes.

You also might be able to borrow a radar gun from the baseball coach ... just a thought.

Answer 6

You can calculate the average velocity of your serve along a straight path with the following formula:

v = d/t

v is the velocity in [m/sec] (meter/second)

d is the distance that the ball travels in [m] meter

t  is the time that the ball needs to travel the distance in [sec] seconds

To get the velocity in [km/h] (kilometre/hour) you have to multiply the velocity in [m/sec] with 3.6  (e.g.: 10 m/sec = 36 km/h)

So what you could do is to position yourself 10 m from a wall. Then you hit the ball straight at the wall at a point approximately at the height of the net. (Lets assume the ball travels in a straight and horizontal line, which of course it does not but we don't want to damage our brains with too much realism, do we?)

So the "d" in the formula above is 10 m.

Now things get a little bit more complicated.

The quality needed for the time measurement depends on your serving speed:

To keep within an error margin of +/- 5 km/h your timing error must be smaller than:

+/- 0.20 sec for a serving speed of 30 km/h

+/- 0.11 sec for a serving speed of 40 km/h

+/- 0.05 sec for a serving speed of 60 km/h

+/- 0.03 sec for a serving speed of 80 km/h

That means, if your serve is relatively slow, manual timing is an option because with a little practice it is possible to operate a stop watch manually with an error of +/- 0.1 seconds.

For faster serving I thought of an other possibility:

If you have a laptop with a microphone you could try to record the sound of your serve with a program that allows to display the recorded sound waves graphically on a zoom-able time scale. There are a lot of freeware programs on the web that can do that.

Then you have to find the first time stamp (t1) where you hit the ball and the second time stamp (t2) where the ball hits the wall.

Then you calculate t=t2-t1 to get the "t" in the formula above.

Finally a small table:

s [m]...t [sec]...v [km/h]

10...I...1.20...I...30

10...I...1.03...I...35

10...I...0.90...I...40

10...I...0.80...I...45

10...I...0.72...I...50

10...I...0.65...I...55

10...I...0.60...I...60

10...I...0.55...I...65

10...I...0.51...I...70

10...I...0.48...I...75

10...I...0.45...I...80

10...I...0.42...I...85

10...I...0.40...I...90

10...I...0.38...I...95

10...I...0.36...I...100

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And now have fun and slam it!