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Does Youth Rule? Trends in the Ages of American Women Tennis Players, 1960-1992
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 There is a widespread belief that competitive women tennis players are typically younger today than in the past. Peter Alfano, currently editor of lnternational Tennis, explained in 1989 that there were three principal reasons for this. One was technological change since the mid-1970s in the construction of rackets: “young players are now able to compensate for a lack of size and strength with the power generated by these rackets.” A second was increasing opportunities for juniors to play competitive tennis, allowing players to “become match-tough and accustomed to pressure at an early age.” And a third was improved preparation: young players have “benefited from advances in training.
and conditioning practices.” As a result of these and other changes, Alfano concluded, “the primary age of a tennis pro is being lowered.” Similar observations have been offered by several of today’s top women players. When an interviewer recently asked her, “Why are there more 15-year-olds surfacing now compared to when you started playing professionally?”
Martina Navratilova replied: “There’s much better coaching, better equipment. Times have changed. For the better? I don’t know. Players are better at an earlier age, but then they quit earlier as well.” In discussing the consequences of this pattern, Navratilova mentioned the cases of Tracy Austin and Andrea Jaeger, both of whom had been ranked among the world’s top three players by the age of 17, but both of whom were forced to retire in 1983, at the ages of 20 and 18, respectively, as a result of tennis-related injuries. Navratilova predicted that such cases would become more common in the future: “We’ll see these hot flashes in the pan and then they’ll just disappear.” Monica Seles recently compared women’s tennis to another Does Youth Rule‘? sport dominated by young athletes: “I think what’s happening in tennis is what’s happening in gymnastics. The players are getting younger and younger.” She referred to the recent succession of young women champions, including Tracy Austin, Steffi Graf, Seles herself, Jennifer Capriati, and Anke Huber, and noted: “Each younger one is doing better and better. I don’t know what age it will end.”
The innovations cited by Alfano and others may have resulted in changes in playing techniques and training methods that have lowered the optimum age of women tennis players. Yet beyond the dramatic examples of a handful of champions whose careers are familiar even to casual sports fans. Little is known of the experience of the great majority of competitive players.
Do women tennis players mature earlier today than they did 10, 20, or 30 years ago? Do they typically reach their competitive peak sooner, and retire earlier? This paper will use quantitative evidence on the careers of a sizeable group of players to provide systematic answers to these questions.
The Data
No available data source contains information about the careers of all world-class women tennis players over an extended period of time. Lacking such a source, this study is based on a data set constructed to cover a substantial subset of world-class players over the past three decades. Specifically, this study attempted to obtain the ages of all women who were nationally ranked by the United States Tennis Association during the years 1960-1992.
The published women’s rankings do not include information on the ages of those ranked. The ages of the great majority of the women were obtained through searches of the USTA’s published national rankings for girls aged 18 and under, 16 and under, and 14 and under, which do include birthdates for all ranked. Some nationally ranked women could not be found in junior rankings from earlier years; ages for some of these were obtained from other published sources, from the records of USTA sectional associations, or from interviews with players.
The number of women ranked is determined annually by the USTA ranking committee and has increased substantially during the period considered here. From an annual average of 28 women in the 1960s, the number more than doubled to an average of 58 during the ’70s, and increased further to 69 in the ’80s, before falling to an average of 47 during 1990-92. A total of 341 different women were nationally ranked during 1960-92. The data set used in this study includes birthdates for 324 of these, or 95 percent of the total. Those with missing birthdates tended to be less successful players, as none of the 17 was ranked in more than three years, and only four ever held numerical rankings in the top 40.
Competitive tennis is an international industry, and it is unfortunate that this study is restricted to American citizens and residents. Yet the United States is by far the single most important source of world class tennis players. In 1992, for example, 25 of the top 100 women in the year-end international singles rankings were American, while no other country accounted for as many as half that number. In the same year, more than one fifth of the women who played singles at Wimbledon were American, as were more than one quarter of those who played at the U.S. Open.
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