Stroke Distribution and Footwork Agility: A critical Analysis of India's elite female Table Tennis Player in International Tournament

Abstract: The study aims to find out the strokes and footwork used by the elite Female Indian athlete at international competition. Only Singles match format was taken into consideration. In order to evaluate the selected KPIs, Dartfish Pro S 2024 Switzerland software was used. A total of 10 International matches were taken into consideration and only Indian player’s performance were analyzed. Where Stroke and Footwork were considered as KPIs. The match video clips were extracted from secondary source (ITTFWORLD YouTube Channel), matches were tagged on slow motion and frame by frame using Dartfish Pro S 2024 Switzerland. Successively all the data collected are exported to Microsoft Excel for analyzing and data visualization. A total of 10 matches 41 sets were played. Overall, 2024 strokes were used in which 1371 backhand and 653 forehand strokes were used and under that 1177 Defensive and 847 Offensive strokes were used. The result of the study reveals that elite Indian Female athletes in international competition adopt to more defensive playing style as defensive stroke percentage is higher when compare to offensive stroke percentage (58% Defensive, 42% offensive). Amongst the Defensive stroke, 16.69% were Block, 1.87% were Chop, 39.37% were Push, and 0.197% were Lob and amongst the Offensive stroke, 5.7% were Flick, 15.85% were Topspin, 2.07% were Topspin counter topspin, 13.38% were Drive and 4.74% were Smash. In terms Footwork, 31.75% were one step, 26.68% were slide step, 30% were stroke without step, 3.03% were pivot step, 8.1% were jumping step, and 0.149% were crossover step. Further, the result of the study revealed that elite Indian Female athlete uses 68% of the time backhand stroke and 32% of the time forehand stroke indicating that their Backhand stroke is more dominant.