Does a Tennis Player’s Age Correlate With Their Rank?

Everyone remembers their time playing high school sports. The mix of casual yet highly competitive activities provided a break from the monotony of school life. Whether it was a team sport, like football or basketball, or an individual one like golf, swimming or gymnastics, high school sports were fun for everyone, at least it was for me. I started playing tennis at around 11 years old. I quickly came to love it, and not play on the varsity team at Anderson. Countless weekends were spent watching great professionals play tennis, each with their own unique style and strengths. This is why I chose to analyze tennis statistics for this project. What many people don’t know is that tennis is one of the sports with the most statistics attached. Hundreds of points are played in each match, and each provides their own data to create a whole picture of a tennis player. For this project, I’m analyzing where a player’s age correlates with their rank. I like this topic because I believe it’s a highly controversial one specifically in this sport. The “golden age” of tennis is coming to a close, and the “big three” are getting older, new, younger players are filling the wide gaps Federer, Nadal, and Djokovic are leaving behind. Many critics claim that younger tennis players like Carlos Alcaraz, Jannik Sinner, and Holger Rune simply have more athleticism and energy than older players do, and I tend to agree with them. I think a tennis player’s age will be correlated with their rank, in that the younger players will tend to be higher ranked than older players, because their youth brings them more athleticism and stamina to overpower older players (Datahub.io, 2017). 

Graph with all Data Points showing relationship between age and rank in Tennis

I originally thought that the younger a player was, the more likely they were to be ranked higher, because younger players have more athleticism and energy than older players. However, I now realize this is wrong, as this graph clearly shows the trendline that points out how it’s actually older players that are more likely to be ranked higher. In fact, the older a player is, the more likely they are to be ranked higher. I believe this is because it takes a long time to win tournaments, and climbing the ladder can sometimes take years. So while it may be true that younger players might have more athleticism and energy, in order to be ranked high in tennis, multiple years must be devoted to climbing the ladder. And obviously there are exceptions, but this seems to be the general conclusion this study came to.

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