I am an avid tennis player. I played the #2 singles position my senior year of high school, and was the captain of the team. I started playing in 6th grade (I guess that would be 11 or 12 years old) and took lessons in the Hershey Racquet Club. (I don't know why the spell check is correcting the word Racquet, because it is another way of spelling racket.) I joined Club Tennis here at Penn State, since I would have to be a God to play for the Intercollegiate team. Intramural would be pointless for me, so I found Club to be a happy medium. The plus side of playing Club Tennis is that members get to play on the Sarni Tennis Facility, where the Varsity team plays. The courts are extremely nice, as I played on them on Monday. I was happy to find that the other players were pretty good and about my level.
I also love to watch tennis. In professional tournaments, the courts the pro players play on have all types of technology. First, there is the device that clocks the speed of the serve. Also, there is a sensor on the net to detect if the ball nipped the net on the serve. Most of these two technologies are made by IBM.There is also what is called Shot Spot. When the ball is very close to the line, and a player thinks the line judge made a bad call, they can challenge it. Shot Spot shows the exact movement of the ball and re-enacts how the ball bounced on a large screen display. It is displayed in 3-D simulation by using an application called PointTracker which was created by IBM. Shot Spot works by using 4 high-speed cameras on each corner of the court stadium. This technology is also called Hawk-Eye, which was developed by Roke Manor Research Limited engineers in 2001. Another technology is the MacCAM which was named after the infamous John McEnroe, who always yelled at the chair umpire and line judges for bad calls. MacCAM is a system of slow-motion cameras developed by FastCAM Replay LLC and Del Imaging Systems LLC. Unlike Shot Spot, the footage recorded by these cameras are shown to viewers only, and cannot be used to make judgments.
An image of Shot Spot
John McEnroe
Links:
Shot Spot
MacCAM
PointTracker