Surveillance of Injury Types, Locations, and Intensities in Male and Female Tennis Players: A Content Analysis of Online Newspaper Reports

Abstract

The popularity of modern tennis has contributed to the increasing number of participants at both recreational and competitive levels. The influx of numerous tennis participants has resulted in a wave of injury occurrences of different types and magnitudes across both male and female players. Since tennis injury harms both players’ economic and career development, a better understanding of its epidemiology could potentially curtail its prevalence and occurrences. We used online-based tennis-related injury reports to study the prevalence, location types, and injury intensities in both male and female tennis players for the past five years. It is demonstrated from the chi-square analysis that injury occurrences are significantly associated with a specific gender (χ2(18) = 50.773; p = 0.001), with male players having a higher risk of injury manifestation (68.10%) as compared with female players (31.90%). Nonetheless, knee, hip, ankle, and shoulder injuries are highly prevalent in both male and female players. Moreover, the injury intensities are distributed across gender (χ2(2) = 0.398; p = 0.820), with major injuries being dominant, followed by minor injuries, whilst a few cases of career-threatening injuries were also reported. It was similarly observed that male players recorded a higher degree of both major, minor, and career-threatening injuries than female players. In addition, male players sustained more elbow, hip, knee, shoulder, and thigh injuries than female players. Whereas, female players mostly suffered from Achilles and back injuries, ankle and hamstring injuries affected both genders. The usage of online newspaper reports is pivotal in characterizing the epidemiology of tennis-related injuries based on locations and gender to better understand the pattern and localization of injuries, which could be used to address the problem of modern tennis-related injuries.

Retirements of professional tennis players in second- and third-tier tournaments on the ATP and WTA tours

“…Although this was not the objective of the study, as ATP and WTA competitions are independent and different, which makes it difficult to compare between genders, male competitions seem to have a higher incidence rate than female tournaments. These results are similar to those of other studies [ 20 , 38 , 74 ], in which the overall incidence was lower in female than in male players. Nevertheless, research findings are inconclusive as it has been reported higher injury rates for female players [ 30 ], as well as no evidence to suggest differences in retirement rates between men and women [ 20 , 39 ].…”

Exploring Denial Strategies against Climate Change across Agents and Media Platforms

“…As a result, the test will not operate with numeric data that is parametric or continuous. Thus, the data set required to conduct the Chisquare test should be in the form of frequency, i.e., count datasets, rather than percentages, percentiles, or relative frequency (Musa et al, 2021).…”

A longitudinal analysis of injury characteristics among elite and amateur tennis players at different tournaments from electronic newspaper reports

“…Additionally, emerging themes were verified to avoid reproducing the news content. Similarly, the emerging themes were validated to prevent replicating media content ( 42 ). Specifically, the researchers tried to explore tennis-related injuries in terms of the types of injuries, level of expertise, and tournament types throughout the coding process.…”

“…Towel curl, toe pull, standing heel raise, and golf ball roll could help in tackling ankle injuries. Exercises such as lying leg extension, standing hamstring stretch, static quadriceps stretch as well as passive quadriceps stretch could be useful for the thigh-related injuries ( 42 , 61 ). These sets of exercises could be beneficial to both the athletes and the coaching staff as they may serve as an intervention strategy to prolong and safeguard the players' careers as well as improve their performance.…”