I probably couldn’t score a point against anyone posting in this thread.
As others have indicated, only if the other player double faults.
20 yrs ago, I was decent recreational player. never really played competitively. I played against some lowly ranked college players. Players that were on the cusp of making their college team.
If they wanted, they could have white-washed me. Goose Eggs.
and I feeling that ranked female player would do the same.
I am a low handicap golfer, and I have played with tour pros. (Lanny Wadkins, Gibby Gilbert back in their prime, Chad Campbell recently). They beat me handily, but I know that I might get lucky and beat them on a hole or two.
If I got my golf game in shape, (I don’t play much anymore), I think I could give a rank/file LPGA player a run for the money. but I never played with a professional female player.
I couldn’t do it now, but back in the day, I was a pretty decent tennis player. Played a serve & volley style, and the serve was the strongest part of my game. I think I probably could’ve snuck in a couple of aces during the course of a match.
I’m not sure. Is there any way to score when you are curled up in a ball covering your head with your arms?
I’m a 4.0 USTA player, which is one half to one level below what working pros (e.g. people who make their living teaching people to play tennis.) play at.
Yes, I could score a point. I’ve played against working pros before and can certainly score points off them. That’s not to say I could easily win a game or an entire match, but sure I could win a point here and there, based on nothing but my lack of pace and my opponent’s unforced errors. In fact, some pros can’t take anything but pace because they’ve been trained since Day 1 to pound the hell out of the ball.
I probably could figure out which way to hold the the tennis bat… eventually; might not score any goals with it tho, just not my sport. 
In a best of 5 they would need to score 72 points to win. Now I haven’t played in a while and was never that good to begin with, but knowing scoring a point is all I had to do, I would expect to able to score one or two points. I’d just be going all out for every ball I got a shot at, a tennis court is large enough to make the winner out of nothing possible, regardless of the opponent. If you were talking about squash however, I think I wouldn’t be able to hit any shot that a pro would be unable to reach and once you’re in a rally there’s no chance. even when I play with my equally limited friends it seems almost impossible to hit an immediate winner, you have to structure your points.
Back to tennis, I think it is pretty hard to keep concentrated if you’re that much better and these guys will probably start making a few errors - or giving you opportunities - because of the gulf in class.
Now I couldn’t but when I was younger I used to have an hour tennis lesson every week with a professional coach. He was way, way better than me, even allowing for the fact he was watching me to coach me rather than playing to win. One day chatting to him I suggested that against a real pro I would get crushed and not win a point.
He thought I would win a few points. Once in a while on serve I would place one perfectly and hit the volley winner. When I got a serve in the right place I would hit the odd unplayable return.
A while later I offered to stand on the other side of the net for a guy practicing where my friends and I were playing. He was playing in a major televised international juniors tournament. He was hitting serves into an empty court.
He was happy to do it and after he finished his serves we started to play. I suppose I was 24 or 25 and he was 16, but he was one of the guys who wanted to play professional tennis. He was awesome. The first second serve he hit to me I took the racket back to play a backhand and it curved so far that it beat me on the other side while I just looked at it.
Once I got used to things I had the time of my life. I didn’t have to take big backswings. He hit the ball so hard that all I had to do was get set early and stroke the ball, just worrying about placement. He was still able to monster me but once in a while I could make an opportunity and play something unreturnable.
If I drew a woman I may be able to win a point even now. I recall that Martina Navratilova was asked once where she would rank if she played on the men’s tour and she thought about 600.
The question was not whether I could return a serve against Federer; it was whether I could score a point against a randomly chosen player at the US Open. And remember that with tennis, it’s conceivable that I don’t have to do anything to score but serve the ball into the service box.
I doubt I could return any serves at all against any of the great male servers. In fact, I might get hurt standing out there because I’m too slow to react. But I’m confident I could return a serve against some of the women with goofy serves (e.g. Dementieva), because they aren’t consistently great servers which means that they’re prone to double faults. I’m also fairly confident that one of my poopy serves might draw ONE unforced error because they are used to more pace. In matches, I usually score more points by taking pace off my serve and placing it than trying to hit the hell out of it, especially against players who have great ground strokes.
IMO, it’s akin to having a really good amateur player going head to head against a pro, not for an individual hole even, but stroke for stroke. An amateur may very well hit one singular drive, or putt, better than a pro. However, that’s not really a measure of anything, though, because golf, like tennis is not about single shots. It’s about putting together a string of winning shots, more often than your opponent can.
I’ve only played tennis a couple times, but it seems that this particular challenge isn’t impossible for someone who plays tennis (as opposed to say scoring a point against Kobe Bryant one-on-one or something). If you’re not trying to win, just score a single point over the whole match, then all you need to do is make the riskiest serves you can. Sure you’ll double-fault most of the time, and a pro will probably return most of the ones that are in, but it shouldn’t take that good a serve to get lucky at some point and get an ace in, right?
Math, since I had a spreadsheet open anyway: in a 3-set match, you’re guaranteed 24 serving points.
So, if you crank up the power and aim for the lines on your serve so that you have only a 3% chance of getting a serve in, and the pro will return for winners half of the serves that do go in (and you lose every single point that the pro serves) you are barely more likely than not to get a point (51.6% by my calc) over the two sets that the match will go.
Believe it or not, but aces don’t come around that often in amateur tennis. If I were to win a few points in a match, it will probably not be by an ace. I think you have more chance with a service return (second serve or a toned down first serve) where you 'guess’the right way and attempt a risky shot, the ball will be coming at you with speed so you won’t have to do that much with it.
Probably. But its also probably true that the best football player in the world is an accounts receivable manager in sacramento, and the best tennis player changes tires in east bumfuck kansas, the best pitcher to ever exist is serving 5 years upstate for dealing meth, etc, etc.
Some people would compete, and even excel. Well, at least in sports where age isn’t as much of a factor.
Yep. I’d even bet on it. Not a lot, but cash money. All it would take is one double fault.
As others have said, people don’t understand the gap between amateur and professional is so vast. The best player you’ve ever faced would be hard pressed to get a point against a tennis pro. At best, I might get a racket onto his server (if I’m lucky) and my serves would come back to me too quickly for me to get a return.
A few years ago, I watched Syracuse playing the Harlem Globetrotters in an exhibition game. Syracuse was the reigning national champion. Someone with me said something about it being a close game. I said, “Are you kidding?”
The Trotters – who were playing seriously – wiped the floor with the college team. They would throw the ball hard from the Syracuse foul circle toward their own basket, even though there was no one on the team there, and trust that someone would not only be fast enough to catch it before it went out of bounds, but would also get there faster than anyone on the Syracuse team. And it would work.
And these were people who weren’t quite good enough to get a regular NBA job (though some had played there).
The only option here would be a double fault, and you can bet the pro wouldn’t do that, either, since he could just go at 3/4 speed on his serves.
If I had first serve, and they didn’t know I sucked, I might be able to score on my first shot, when my weak serve bounced 2x before making it to the service… however, if they got to see me warm up, I would be toast…
Since I haven’t played in about 10 years, and I was absolute crap then, I doubt I could reliably score a point against a cardboard cutout of a tennis pro.
I believe it, but also believe that most amateurs (and most pros) are trying to win, and therefore are trying not to double-fault (at least not double-fault very often). I’m wondering if forgetting about double-faulting – in fact trying to hit most of your serves out – would enable a reasonable amateur to crank up their serve enough to eventually get one that’s both in and missed by the pro.
It seems that some people aren’t considering this, since there’s been mentions of second serves. If you’re just trying to get one point, why is your second serve any weaker than your first?
Pros are not superhuman. Sure, the odds of you beating one are a trillion to one (or even worse), but they do make mistakes. They’re almost guaranteed to make some unforced errors against you, be it a double fault, a random ball into the net, or just an overenthusiastic winner attempt, even if you were not anywhere near the level they’re used to playing.
Notice how even when pros are warming up with each other before a match, in a perfect, cooperative groove, one of them will brick it every so often.
I once had the opportunity to play against a tennis coach who had coached some lower-ranking pros. He said that one of his main selling points as a coach (and player) was his pro-level serves, which they would practice against constantly. Now I’m just a decent recreational player (some guys I play with are apparently USTA 3.5-4.0 whatever that means), and most of his serves did blow past me with a whiff or a wild ricochet off into nowhere. However, even my relatively low skill allowed me to return maybe 5-10% of them, and a couple of those ended up being return winners. Yes, that’s just luck, but I’m pretty confident that most decent players would be scoring a few points against random rank 100 pros.
The only professional sport i could see myself scoring a point in would be basketball.
I had a similar experience as Windwalker. I played high school and college (low-tier junior college) and one of my coaches had played semi-pro tournaments with some success. He was able to send ridiculous power or spins that took quite some time to get used to, simply because they are outside of the typical amateur player experience.
After some time, I was able to reliably return many serves that I could get a racket on (the aces of course simply go by untouched) and return a fair amount of honest winners. With my own serves, I could reliably expect to make a half-dozen aces in a match, so given the two parameters (returns & serves) I’d statistically give myself a good chance of picking up a point or two against a pro.