Some Statistics on Where Points Are Won

I am interested in collecting some data on how points are ended at the Downs courts.  I recorded the details for four evenly matched games for, let's call them some of our, advanced players. 

I roughed out some categories of how the points ended.  I think I would add more reasons/columns for points lost when I do it again.  For example hitting the ball out is worse than popping it up, but not by much.  I can't see those details in the data I have.

I've tabulated the results below in case anyone wants to do their own analysis.  The results were a bit surprising to me, as I was not expecting as many winners as I saw.  I would have expected more errors, but about  40% of all points were ended with a winner.  

Note that if someone popped one up and it was put away, that was a winner and not a dink or ground stroke error, though the case could be made for more categories to separate these kind of things.

Ground stroke errors and balls hit out, were the major errors I saw.  These two categories were pretty close in number at about 22% each.

And finally the last large category was dink errors at about 11%.

Let me lay out some more caveats.  The skill levels of the games were different by a little bit.  For example I looked at no beginners, or intermediate players, which would be very interesting as it could answer some questions about game development and might suggest areas for teaching or training.  Most of the games were quite close in score, so the errors would be distributed to both teams.  If the games were all 11-0, then the losers were creating all the misses and maybe the winners all the put away shots.  

Then there is style.  One of the games had a lot of dinking and was less about banging the ball.  In that case, I would expect more dink errors as that would be the more frequent shot.  But if the dinkers were used to that kind of game, they might well be better at it, so loses might show up in winners than dink errors. 

In a bangers' game, there may be more ground stroke errors as people don't / can't get to the KL.  Probably more winners too, as angles get created or feet get hit.  No conclusions from me, too early to tell!

Finally, I'm interested in how some stats might be useful to point to personal skill issues.  For example, there were very few serves going out.  But if you personally hit out three a game, then you might want to work on that.  It might be reasonable to suggest that the categories that have very low percentage frequency, are ones for skills that have to be mastered if you tend to make those errors.  Then as a guide, it looks like everyone struggles with hitting it out and ground stroke errors - so getting better there will lead to immediate improvement.

Here are the data, raw and percentages and some average values to follow.

	How Poiints ended		Other than winners, all columns are for errors
Game #		Winners	Serves	Serve   Returns	Grnd Strokes	Drops	Dinks	Out Balls	Total Points
1		14	4	1	20	1	7	5	52
2		13	2	0	8	0	5	16	44
3		16	0	0	9	0	3	11	39
4		21	2	1	5	3	4	7	43
	Percentages
1		26.92%	7.69%	1.92%	38.46%	1.92%	13.46%	9.62%
2		29.55%	4.55%	0.00%	18.18%	0.00%	11.36%	36.36%
3		41.03%	0.00%	0.00%	23.08%	0.00%	7.69%	28.21%
4		48.84%	4.65%	2.33%	11.63%	6.98%	9.30%	16.28%
	Ave	36.58%	4.22%	1.06%	22.84%	2.22%	10.45%	22.62%