“It’s so subjective,” says Mike Gennette, the men’s and women’s coach at Cal Lutheran University. “Every shot applies pressure, especially the way the pros hit today.”
As Kovacs points out, the term was created in a different era. “At the time with wood racquets and first generation graphite racquets,” he says, “there was more time to determine what was forced and what was unforced.”
Limited Value for Coaches & Players
So while the unforced error might have entertainment value for tennis fans, its subjective nature and subsequent value makes it a highly limited tool for coaches.
Says Kovacs: “Of the coaches I deal with, none looks at unforced errors on the stat sheet. They’re looking at other statistics that are controllable.”
Rather than summon up a subjective tally, coaches prefer to zero in on specific points to review matters of shot selection and execution.
For many years, a common shorthand way to assess the quality of play has been to compare winners and unforced errors. One form of thinking believes that a 2:1 ratio of winners to unforced errors reveals that the player played an excellent match. But O’Shannessy’s belief is that the fear of committing an unforced error hurts young players, a binary distinction between not missing and hitting untouchable shots.
“They look at our sport as a game of perfection instead of one of errors,” he says. The mission should be to build skills and deploy aggression appropriately enough to elicit errors.
There might be other ways to bring more nuance to match analysis. Levin pondered the idea of an “aggressive ratio,” which would tally up a player’s winners and the errors he forced. The match summaries created by SMT, the company Levin worked for that tracks data at the Australian Open, Wimbledon, and the US Open, provide this information.
In the 2022 US Open final, for example, the victorious Carlos Alcaraz won 127 points versus Casper Ruud—55 with winners, 43 by generating forced errors, 29 by Ruud’s unforced errors. For what it’s worth, Alcaraz had 12 more unforced errors than Ruud.