Using a theoretical morphospace to inform tennis racket shape design

Engineering of Sport 15 - Proceedings from the 15th International Conference on the Engineering of Sport (ISEA 2024)

Tennis racket design has changed a lot from its conception in the 1870s. We previously used two-dimensional shape analyses, termed morphometrics, to quantify how tennis racket shape had changed over time. Specifically, we showed that innovations in materials, especially in fibre-polymer composites, have overcome the mechanical constraints of wood, allowing modern rackets to have larger, and more oval (or egg-shaped) heads than their wooden predecessors. Indeed, with material advances, tennis racket shape is not really restricted now and, as long as it adheres to governing body regulations (of length and width), it has the capacity to be really quite diverse. Despite the design freedom offered by modern materials, tennis racket shape has barely changed in the last few decades, and even if we wanted it to, how could we systematically explore and identify new possible racket shapes? This paper moves beyond our previous shape analyses by exploring a technique developed in Evolutionary Biology, termed “theoretical morphospace”. We adopt this technique to systematically identify and explore new possible shapes for tennis racket designs