Grunting in tennis is one of those topics that sounds trivial until you’re on the return side of a long, lingering noise that hangs in the air while the ball is still traveling toward you. That’s when “just ignore it” stops being useful advice and turns into a real question about focus, fairness, and the unwritten culture of a sport that often expects near silence. In this conversation, we dig into why some grunts barely register while others feel disruptive, how singles can amplify the annoyance, and why the length of the sound matters as much as the volume. A quick exhale on a stretch volley feels different than a full follow-through grunt that continues into your opponent’s hitting window, and that difference is exactly where frustration starts for many recreational tennis players.

We are replaying this episode but let us know if you grunt!

Here’s a Transcript of our Conversation with Mike:

Tennis Grunting: Distraction, Rules and Hindrances

Carolyn 0:03
Hi, this is Carolyn and I’m here with Erin, and I’m really excited: my husband Mike is here with us tonight. For a little background, he is a USTA 4.0. Tonight we’re going to talk about grunting. I played someone recently with a really long grunt. I’ve played people who grunted previously and it didn’t bother me, but this time it did. I think it bothered me more because I’ve played other sports, and tennis is supposed to be such a quiet sport. You’re not allowed to talk, but you are allowed to grunt. So let’s start with Mike. Has your opponent grunting ever bothered you?

Mike 0:42
No, I mean, normally most grunting doesn’t bother me. I don’t tend to notice it on the court. There’s a wide distribution of people who grunt, right? Some people grunt extremely loud on every single point, no matter what the shot is. Some people never make a noise on the court, and most people are somewhere in the middle. I think I fall in the middle. I’ll grunt on a point where I’m reaching or having to really extend or push myself. I do sometimes grunt, but not every single point. For the most part, with 99% of my opponents, I don’t have any issue with it being distracting to me. That’s where I’ve always been. How about you, Erin?

Erin 1:36
Yeah, I think I fall right where you do. I know people we play against who grunt, but it doesn’t typically bother me, because I know it’s just part of their game. I think I was watching a pro match, and you know, there are some that are notorious for grunting. Maria Sharapova used to do it really badly when she was playing, and Azarenka does it, and of course Serena, on hard shots, and they scream. Then I was at a clinic with a friend, talking about making sounds, and I tried really hard to grunt as I was hitting, and it messed me up and it made me laugh really hard. I just can’t do it. But I do it sort of quietly when I’m trying to hit a winner. I can hear myself doing it, but I’m sure other people don’t hear it. Even that makes me laugh, because it seems so serious when I’m grunting. I guess it’s just a natural thing. I don’t remember a lot of people it’s bothered me with. But Carolyn, it sounds like you’ve had several. Is it mostly singles? Is it doubles? Does it run the gamut?

Carolyn 2:50
It’s mostly singles, and it’s the long grunt. It’s the grunt where the ball’s still coming your way. They’ve already hit the ball and you’re still hearing their grunt.

Erin 3:00
It’s like a follow-through grunt.

Carolyn 3:01
Yes. I was telling Mike, what’s the difference between that and me yelling a word right after I hit the ball to my opponent, like “Miss it”? For them, they’re making a noise. That’s a hindrance. If I yell a word right after I hit the ball, what’s the difference between a word and them still making a noise?

Mike 3:24
Yeah.

Carolyn 3:25
Yeah.

Mike 3:25
That’s a good point. It’s a gray area that we don’t like. When it’s such a long grunt that it lingers the whole time the ball is coming toward you, that’s interesting.

Carolyn 3:36
So I looked up the USTA rule on this, in Friend at Court. This is page 42, number 37 of the code, and it says, “Grunting. A player should avoid grunting and making other loud noises. Grunting and other loud noises may bother not only the opponents, but also players on adjacent courts. In an extreme case, an opponent or a player on an adjacent court may seek the assistance of an official. Grunting and the making of loud noises that affect the outcome of a point are hindrances.” But then they go on to say that only an official may rule that these actions are hindrances, in order that a let be played or a point lost, depending on whether an official had previously warned the offending player. So basically there is no rule when we’re playing, right? There’s nothing.

Erin 4:19
Yeah, because there’s no official at any of our matches, ever. Even at states, we asked for an official to be on a court with someone we knew made bad line calls, and they literally said, “We don’t have enough volunteers,” or “We don’t have an official on site.” We requested one and one couldn’t come to our court. I don’t know if this has ever happened to you, Mike. But in a regular USTA match, there is no official to call it.

Mike 4:54
No. So essentially the rule says try not to grunt, and if you do, there’s nothing your opponent can do about it. So okay.

Erin 5:06
So there’s really not a rule.

Mike 5:08
So there’s really not a rule.

Erin 5:09
There’s really not a rule. I was going to ask Mike, I’m assuming a lot more men grunt than women. Does it not bother you? Do you find that a lot of men do it?

Mike 5:21
I think grunting is kind of like throwing your racket, in men’s versus women’s. Carolyn has said to me how shocked she was in one of her matches that an opponent threw a racket. An opponent throws a racket in one out of every two matches I’m involved in. Not necessarily on my court, but if you’re playing a USTA match, once every other week someone will be throwing a racket around on a men’s court. I think grunting is kind of the same thing. There are lots of men who grunt and yell and are much more vocal on the tennis court than on the women’s court, I think. But I kind of think of it as a bell curve, like I talked about earlier. Most people are in the middle. We make some noises when we’re really struggling, or really trying hard to reach a ball, or really trying to nail that overhead or whatever. And on either end, there are people who are super quiet, and there are people who grunt really loud or have just odd grunts.

Carolyn 6:30
Every time they hit the ball.

Mike 6:31
Every time they hit the ball.

Mike 6:55
Yeah, like you mentioned earlier, Erin.

Erin 6:58
Yeah, I think a couple of the commentators, like Martina Navratilova, actually complain about it, because I don’t think she ever did it in her time. She thinks it’s ridiculous and it’s gotten out of hand. I actually watched a match today, one of the lead-up tournaments to the Australian Open, and Sabalenka was playing. She goes bigger and bigger, she has no in-between. They actually said that when she’s struggling, she starts to grunt even more, because she hits the ball harder instead of pulling it back a notch. So they always listen for that, when she’s going even more.

Carolyn 7:33
Yeah. After the girl was grunting on every single stroke, I looked it up and I was like, is grunting beneficial? I found an article from The Guardian in 2018 that said, “What can the science tell us about grunting in tennis?” What they said is that grunting could be considered performance enhancing for the grunter and performance hindering for their opponent. They’ve done some preliminary experimental work that showed grunting may mask important auditory information used by an opponent, because they’re grunting as they’re hitting the ball, so you can’t hear anything. They took skilled university tennis players, and there was a 3.8% increase in groundstroke hitting velocity when they grunted. For their serve, there was a 4.9% enhancement in velocity when they grunted.

Erin 8:28
And since we’re a data-driven society now, that probably means it’s here to stay, and even future generations will become even louder, because they’ll start teaching it in college.

Mike 8:41
It sounds like if it increases your velocity by almost 5%… it says on a serve, 4.9%.

Erin 8:50
So what you’re saying is we basically need to start grunting, Carolyn, to increase our velocity. I’m the dummy for not grunting. That’s another thing we’ve got to practice and remember. Tennis is already hard enough.

Mike 9:03
Practice your grunt.

Erin 9:05
Practice your grunt. That’s right.

Carolyn 9:08
That’s right.

Mike 9:09
Well, I don’t know about the increase, because we don’t have radar guns when we play either. But we do have some courts in the area that are in loud areas, next to a highway, or next to a fire station where the fire trucks are constantly going in and out. It actually is very distracting when you can’t hear the sound of the ball coming off the opponent’s strings because of the traffic on the interstate right next to the tennis court. You do lose some information on those points when the opponent hits the ball.

Erin 9:45
And the other thing, with college tennis, I think in the last few years, and Carolyn, I think we talked about this a long time ago, they’re actually increasing a lot of crowd noise. It’s almost like Fed Cup, with cowbells and cheering, and pretty soon there’ll be cheerleaders. There’s all this commotion. But for our adult rec tennis, I think people get really irritated if there’s a baby crying, or you’re playing a tennis match at a park and a kid on a playground is screaming, and your opponent gets upset about that poor child who just wants to, whatever. I think it becomes ridiculous that it’s a sport that people feel has to be played in silence almost. So maybe the trend is grunting, and it sounds like it might be here to stay, but I think the trend also is to make it not so quiet. What other sports are super quiet? Tennis, golf… I don’t know. It’s probably all right.

Carolyn 10:54
But it did mess me up. When I played someone who grunted, it really did. And I played someone previously, a few years ago, who was lovely and very good, and every time she hit the ball, even in warm-up, she’d go “Eee.” Every single time it was an “Eee,” and it was so much like a scream that my teammate who was playing singles on the court next to me goes, “Hey, it sounds like you’ve got a screamer on your court.” It was so annoying. I’m fine with it. It’s just that if an “Eee” is allowed, then I think I should be able to say “Miss it” to them, or “Take this,” when I hit the ball. Why is one allowed and one not? That’s my only issue.

Mike 11:39
You don’t like the gray zones.

Erin 11:41
She does not. She likes the set rule. She wants to read it in black and white. I told you I had a kid who was heckling me, right? I was playing his mother in singles, and I thought he was saying “Neutragena” or “Nutrigrain bar,” some sort of food, but he was going, “Nah, nah, nah.” I finally said, “Well, what is he saying?” And she goes, “Hey buddy, what are you saying?” And he said, “Miss the ball,” or something like that. He was three years old, and he was heckling me. I guess I could have called a hindrance on his mother for bringing her three-year-old, but I just let it go. Because again, it’s adult rec tennis, and you become the strange one if you complain about it, as opposed to the person who’s actually doing the hindrance, right?

Mike 12:38
Well, I know Carolyn, you grew up playing basketball, and Carolyn always says, “Why can’t it be like the Duke Blue Devils basketball fans?” If players in the basketball arena are trying to shoot a free throw, and everyone’s behind them, the fans behind the basket spinning their signs around, why can’t we deal with that in tennis?

Carolyn 13:04
Exactly. Thanks very much to Mike for joining us. I now feel like I’m the dumb one on the court for not grunting a lot, but let us know what you think. You can message us on our website, which is secondservepodcast.com. You can also listen to previous episodes there. Mike has done a few before that have been really popular, including whether your racket matters and whether your strings matter, so we hope you check those out. Thanks so much for listening, and we hope to see you on the court soon.