Tennis Rules - Start With The Basics

By: Graham Lavery


Tennis is a very interesting and exciting sport based on a great mental attitude and physical abilities. If you are new to this and you want to play tennis by the book, you need to learn a little about the rules of this sport. As many other sports, these rules are not just things passed from mouth to mouth, they are established and renewed by an organization called the International Tennis Federation.

The first thing you need to learn is about the field you play on. This is called the court and it is usually build according to some clear instructions. The tennis court is 78 feet long. For singles matches, it has 27 feet in width and, 36 feet in width, when doubles matches are played. At the half, the tennis court is crossed by a net that must be made of a metal cable situated at a height of 3.5 feet above the ground and the net. Serving can be performed on the service lines, that must be located 21 feet from each side of the net.

There are some rules referring to the rackets used on the tennis court. They must have only one pair of crisscrossing strings. This is about it when it comes to the racket as any devices with batteries that can be placed on the racket are strictly forbidden. You may use some vibration dampening devices, but these can only be put outside the strings.

As any other sport, scoring is very important because it tells you who wins the game. There is a specific technology used in tennis for keeping up the scoring. The players must call out their score when they are serving the ball. They start by saying �Love�, which means zero points, and then the scoring gets up to 15, 50, 40 and game. When both players have accumulated 40 points each, the score is called by the word �Deuce�. In this situation, the game must become a tie-breaker. Any point accumulated by a player gives this person what it called �Advantage�. If the player with the �Advantage� scores again, the game is over, and if the other one scores, the score is again called �Deuce�. Seven games are usually played to decide the winner. What is interesting about tennis is that the winner must have two games ahead the opponent. When the final score is 4 to 3, another match must be played in order to decide the winner. If the conditions are all met, and one player is the best in 7 games and there is a distance of 2 or more games from the opponent, than the match has a winner.

Graham Lavery is the Editor and Publisher of Article Click. For more FREE articles for your ezine and websites visit - www.articleclick.com