The Rules of Tennis
The International Tennis Federation (ITF) has stewardship over the Rules of Tennis. There is a process for changing the rules and updates are made on a fairly regular basis. Did you know that until 1961 the player delivering the service had to keep one foot on the ground? The elimination of that requirement was a rule change that materially changed the play of the game. Sometimes updates to the rules emerge from technology advancements. The entire Player Analysis Technology is full of examples of recently added rules and restrictions.
The next section in the Rules of Tennis describes exactly how those changes are made. Spoiler alert! There is a committee for that.
No alteration or interpretation of such Rules shall be made except at an Annual General Meeting of the Council, nor unless notice of the Resolution embodying such alterations shall have been received by the ITF in accordance with Article 17 and such Resolution or one having the like effect shall be carried by a majority of two-thirds of the votes recorded in respect of the same.
USTA Friend at Court, ITF Rules of Tennis, Amendment to the Rules of Tennis
The ITF publishes meeting notes from the Annual General Meeting of the Council. That information is every bit as scintillating as the excerpt quoted above. I know that because I have recently made a hobby of reading them in order to better understand the motivation behind some of the more recent rules updates. To be honest, I haven’t found those meeting notes to be all that enlightening.
Updates to the rules have additional procedural stipulations that are also codified in this section of the ITF Rules of Tennis. First, alterations to the Rules of Tennis usually take effect on the first day of January following approval. However, immediate application is possible if the majority of the Council agrees that it is needed.
Additionally, there is a provision for the ITF Board of Directors to settle urgent questions of interpretation on a temporary basis. The presumption is that those interpretations would be confirmed at the next Annual General Meeting of the Council. There have probably been some disconnects throughout the ages.
Finally, the text in the ITF Rules of Tennis that govern the procedures for changing the rules can only be altered via a unanimous consent of the Annual General Meeting of the Council. That pretty much guarantees that the procedures will never be changed.
The bottom line is that it is possible to change the ITF Rules of Tennis. Indeed, there are updates to the rules all the time. However the process modifying and amending the rules is not swift. Like most big bureaucracies it involves a lot of formal protocol and procedures. Such is the nature of tennis.
- How the Serve Went Over the Top, Geoff MacDonald, New York Times, August 28, 2011.
- United States Tennis Association (2021), Friend at Court: Handbook of Rules and Regulations, White Plains, NY
