The Code, Principle 19: What If You Can’t Tell Whether the Ball Hit You?

Last Wednesday, we started examining Principle 19 of The Code, which identifies five circumstances in which a player must concede a point. We focused on two sentences added sometime between 2001 and 2026 that explicitly state opponents are not entitled to make these calls and that the benefit-of-the-doubt principle applies.

This week, we’re looking at the first of those five circumstances.

Touches, hitting ball before it crosses net, invasion of opponent’s court, double hits, and double bounces. A player must concede the point when:

• A ball in play touches that player;

• That player or that player’s racket touches the net or opponent’s court while a ball is in play;

• That player hits a ball before it crosses the net;

• That player deliberately carries or double hits a ball; or

• A ball bounces more than once in that player’s court.

The opponent is not entitled to make these calls. The principle of giving the opponent the benefit of any doubt applies.

USTA Friend at Court 2026, The Code, Principle 19

That seems straightforward enough. If the ball hits you while it is in play, you lose the point. However, this principle must be understood in conjunction with the primary foundational Rules of Tennis. Specifically, Rule 24(i), which enumerates how points are lost, expands the context quite a bit.

The ball in play touches the player or anything that the player is wearing or carrying, except the racket;

USTA Friend at Court 2026, Rules of Tennis, Rule 24(i)

The additional language makes a difference because the ball doesn’t actually have to touch your body. Contact with your clothing, shoes, or something you are carrying is sufficient. It also doesn’t matter whether the ball was headed out of bounds. If it strikes you before landing, you lose the point.

In many situations, the contact is obvious. A ball hits someone in the shoulder or leg, and there isn’t much to discuss. However, there are other circumstances where even the player involved may have trouble determining exactly what happened.

The most common example occurs in doubles when someone hits a hard ball directly at the net player. The player scrambles to get out of the way, often while simultaneously trying to protect themselves with the racquet. There is a lot happening in a very short period of time, and the resulting physical gyrations aren’t necessarily coordinated or graceful. In that adrenaline-fueled flurry of activity, a ball that grazes the player, their clothing, or their equipment can easily get lost in the noise.

Just last week, another player told me about an incident in one of her matches that illustrates this problem.

She was playing in the “up” net position when her opponents hit a hard line drive directly at her. She responded with what I imagine was like Luke Skywalker wielding a lightsaber, attempting to intercept the ball with her racquet while also getting herself out of the way. Somewhere around chest level, the ball converged with the racquet’s throat and handle, her hands, and possibly her body.

The ball hit something and rebounded into her opponents’ court for what was effectively a drop volley winner.

Her opponents understandably wanted to know whether the ball had struck her racquet, her chest, or possibly nicked her hand around the top of the grip. Unfortunately, she couldn’t reconstruct the sequence with any confidence. She believed the ball had struck the throat of her racquet, forcing her hand and racquet back toward her chest where she admittedly felt some contact. She simply wasn’t sure where the ball was during that melee and what else it might have touched.

Fortunately, the match was being officiated, and an official happened to be standing right there. In adult recreational tennis, having an official in exactly the right place to observe a questionable incident is exceedingly rare. Unfortunately, the official wasn’t sure either. The players eventually all agreed that the ball must have struck the racquet because it rebounded too far to have come directly off her body. The point stood as if the rebound was a legitimate clean winner.

What interests me here is how this specific variation of uncertainty is generally resolved. Most players seem to approach possible contact violations with an expectation that someone needs to be reasonably certain the ball actually struck the player before the point is conceded.

That is understandable. When someone is desperately trying to avoid a ball hurdling toward them at close range, they may genuinely have no idea whether it brushed their shirt or anything else they were holding or carrying. The player who was involved may have the worst perspective of anyone on the court.

However, Principle 19 includes the following language:

The opponent is not entitled to make these calls. The principle of giving the opponent the benefit of any doubt applies.

USTA Friend at Court 2026, The Code, Principle 19

We discussed the first sentence last week. Even if an opponent believes the ball struck a player, that opponent isn’t entitled to make the call. The player who may have been struck is responsible for conceding the point.

The second sentence is where I have some difficulty reconciling the written principle with my experience of what commonly happens on the court in this specific situation. If a player genuinely doesn’t know whether the ball touched their body or clothing, that is precisely the sort of uncertainty that should be resolved in the opponent’s favor.

In my experience, players only to concede these points when they absolutely know contact occurred. If they aren’t sure, the assumption generally seems to be that the ball didn’t touch them. The incident my friend described followed that pattern, although the presence of an official adds another wrinkle.

I don’t think this is necessarily a matter of players trying to avoid conceding points. In most cases, I suspect they are doing their best to determine what happened. The problem is that the standard we universally seem to apply is different from the one explicitly stated in Principle 19.

This story also highlights a meaningful distinction between a player who knows the ball made contact with something and is uncertain whether it was the racquet or their body, and a player who has no particular reason to believe the ball touched anything other than the racquet. I’m not sure how that should be reconciled under the benefit-of-the-doubt language, particularly when the player’s own recollection is flawed and incomplete.

What makes the contact situation particularly interesting is that the player is attempting to reconstruct a physical event that may have lasted only a fraction of a second. There may be no clear visual observation to rely upon, and the sensations associated with a ball striking the racquet, hand, or clothing can overlap.

Principle 19 is clear about who has the authority to make the call. In my experience, uncertainty about whether contact occurred generally results in the point standing, effectively awarding the point to the player who may have committed the violation. In essence, this is a case where the polarity of the benefit-of-the-doubt expectation is reversed to the side of the net that is explicitly not empowered to make the call. It seems reasonable under the circumstances, but it is difficult to reconcile with what The Code actually says.

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1. Friend at Court: The Handbook of Tennis Rules and Regulations, USTA, 2026
2. Friend at Court: The USTA Handbook of Tennis Rules and Regulations, USTA, 2001. (Hardcopy.)