The record for the fastest tennis serve ever delivered in a professional match is 163 miles per hour by Sam Groth in 2012. It is common for professional male players to deliver serves above 130 miles per hour. The task of returning a serve at that speed is beyond challenging; mathematically, it is impossible.

A tennis serve travels about seventy-five feet. When you take into consideration the bounce of the ball, air friction, and spin, it takes about seven hundred milliseconds for a ball to travel from one end of the court to the other. When you calculate the amount of time it takes the human eye and nervous system to process a ball’s movement at that speed, and then consider the time required for a human body to move and accurately swing a racket, the return cannot be performed. The math doesn’t add up. The human body can’t process information and move fast enough to return a professional serve. It can’t be done.

Th is brings us to one important action that expert tennis players can do and which all SMEs should do. The greatest tennis players anticipate the ball’s location. They use clues beyond the ball itself to predict the future. After thousands of hours of practice, the best tennis players can judge a server’s initial toss, posture, and racket placement, and anticipate with accuracy the ball’s eventual location.

Great experts learn to anticipate. They see clues in advance, which lesser mortals do not see. They do not rely solely on the path of the ball itself to tell them where the ball is going. Instead, they incorporate everything around the ball as well.