Game Performance and Length of Rally in Professional Padel Players Courel Ibáñez, Javier Sánchez-Álcaraz Martínez, Bernardino Javier Cañas, Jerónimo Racket sports Match analysis Paddle tennis Performance analysis The purpose of this study was to analyse differences in rally length considering attack effectiveness, a players’ location and a game outcome in professional padel players. A total of 1527 rallies from 10 male matches of the 2013 Masters Finals of the World Padel Tour were registered through systematic observation. Data treatment included non-parametric mean comparisons (Mann-Withney and Kruskal-Wallis tests), and association analyses (crosstabs and Chi square analysis). In overall, 40% of unforced errors were made within the first 4 s of the rally, over 50% of points were scored between the 5th and 11th s, and 30% of forced errors occurred after the 11th –s of the rally. Hence, the ability to score in rallies of over 11 s duration and not making unforced errors within the first 4 s contributed to the rally outcome. More specifically, winners played longer rallies compared to losers (10.42 ± 7.77 s vs. 8.42 ± 6.43 s); particularly at the net, when scoring from the baseline (11.04 ± 7.64 s vs. 8.90 ± 5.41 s) and making forced (8.86 ± 7.44 s vs. 6.86 ± 6.24 s) and unforced errors (11.91 ± 9.47 s vs. 8.33 ± 6.92 s). Such knowledge may have implications in the design and structure of specific training programmes for padel players according to competition requirements. 2017-03-09T10:47:48Z 2017-03-09T10:47:48Z 2017 info:eu-repo/semantics/article Courel-Ibáñez, J.; Sánchez-Álcaraz Martínez, B.; Cañas, J. Game Performance and Length of Rally in Professional Padel Players. Journal of Human Kinetics, 55(1): 161-169 (2017). [http://hdl.handle.net/10481/45157] 1640-5544 1899-7562 http://hdl.handle.net/10481/45157 10.1515/hukin-2016-0045 eng info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess De Gruyter Open