Every Wednesday, this site examines a rule or governing principle that shapes how tennis is actually played. We are currently in the midst of a sequential walkthrough of The Code, exploring one principle at a time as it appears within the USTA’s Friend at Court. Last week, we examined a surprisingly demanding obligation contained in Principle 13. If a player clearly sees one of their own shots land out, The Code says they should let them know even when the opponent does not ask for an opinion. However, the very first sentence contains a conspicuous exception that deserves a closer look.
Player calls own shots out. With the exception of the first serve, a player should call out the player’s own shots if the player clearly sees the ball out regardless of whether requested to do so by an opponent. The prime objective in making calls is accuracy. All players should cooperate to attain this objective.
USTA Friend at Court 2026 , The Code, Principle 13
Player calls own shots out. With the exception of the first serve, a player should call out the player’s own shots if the player clearly sees the ball out regardless of whether requested to do so by an opponent. The prime objective in making calls is accuracy. All players should cooperate to attain this objective.
USTA Friend at Court 2026, The Code, Principle 13
Why is the first serve different?
The answer becomes clearer when considering the competitive incentives created by allowing players to call their own shots out. Doing that almost always runs counter to their own interests. If I clearly see one of my groundstrokes land out when my opponent plays it as good, calling my own ball out means surrendering the point. The same is true if I clearly see my second serve land out. Calling it means acknowledging a double fault and conceding the point.
A first serve creates a fundamentally different situation. Calling your own first serve out does not concede the point. It gives you another opportunity to serve.
That distinction creates the potential for a significant competitive advantage. Imagine hitting a first serve near the service line that the receiver plays as good. If the return is weak, there is little incentive for the server to interrupt the point. If the receiver instead hits an exceptional return, allowing the server to call the original serve out would provide a convenient mechanism for erasing that outcome and trying again with a second serve.
Rules should not create situations where a player has the unilateral ability to invalidate an unfavorable outcome after seeing how the point likely would have transpired. Once the receiver has played the serve, the server knows something they did not know at the moment the serve landed: what happened next.
From that perspective, the first-serve exception is not an inconsistency within Principle 13. Rather, it prevents an incentive disconnect. The general rule requires players to volunteer information when doing so would be a disadvantage. The first-serve exception removes that obligation in the one circumstance where volunteering the same type of information could potentially benefit the person making the call.
The distinction between first and second serves makes that logic particularly clear. If a player clearly sees their second serve land out, Principle 13 contains no corresponding exception. The player should call it. A second-serve out call produces a double fault, so the player gains no competitive advantage by making it. On the first serve, the same action preserves another opportunity to serve. The difference in consequences explains why The Code treats the two situations differently.
There is an interesting tension here with another sentence in Principle 13. As we discussed last week, “The prime objective in making calls is accuracy.” If accuracy is the primary objective, it would seem logical that a server who clearly sees a first serve out should say so. Yet the exception recognizes that accuracy cannot be considered independently from the incentives created by the self-officiating process. A system that allows players to make calls benefiting themselves after seeing how a point begins to unfold would introduce a larger fairness problem in pursuit of correcting a single call.
Principle 13 therefore does something more sophisticated than simply telling players to be honest about what they see. It allocates authority in a way that considers whether exercising that authority could create an advantage for the person making the decision. Most of the time, calling your own shot out requires you to surrender something you otherwise would have received. On a first serve, calling your own ball out can potentially give you something instead.
That is why the exception exists.
Last week, I described Principle 13 as one of the places where the formal expectations of The Code and the unwritten culture of recreational tennis seem to diverge. The first-serve exception reveals that the authors were also attentive to the competitive realities underlying those expectations. Accuracy may be the prime objective, but the mechanisms used to achieve it cannot give players an incentive to selectively erase outcomes they do not like.
- Friend at Court: The Handbook of Tennis Rules and Regulations, USTA, 2026
- Friend at Court: The USTA Handbook of Tennis Rules and Regulations, USTA, 2001. (Hardcopy.)
