Soft tennis

Tennis's officiating, with several of the hard parts removed by the ball.

The calls are the familiar ones: in or out, the serve landing in the correct box, foot faults, net touches, and whether a ball was volleyed before it crossed. An umpire and line judges at championship level; self-officiation below it, as in tennis.

What the soft ball removes is instructive. A slow ball is easier to judge at the line than a fast one, so out calls are less contentious than tennis's. A ball that stays on the strings longer makes double hits and carries visible rather than momentary, which removes a class of dispute. And with no serve worth more than a rally, there is nothing corresponding to a service ace being called wrongly at a decisive moment.

The result is that soft tennis has never needed the ball-tracking review systems that tennis and badminton adopted, and does not use them. It is not that the sport declined the technology on principle — it is that the problem the technology solves is much smaller here.

The doubles positions add one call the neighbouring sports do not have: where a format specifies a forward and a back player, playing out of position is an offence, and it must be judged live.

Three countries play it seriously and everybody else plays it a little.

Japan is the sport. It was invented there, it is a mainstream school and university sport with participation numbers in the millions, and the domestic competitive structure is far deeper than anything international. A very large proportion of the people who have ever played soft tennis have been Japanese schoolchildren.

South Korea and Chinese Taipei are the other two genuine powers, and both acquired the sport during the period of Japanese rule. All three have national programmes and contest Asian Games medals seriously between them.

Beyond that, soft tennis is played in China, the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, India and across a scattering of European and American federations, generally on a small scale and often introduced by Japanese cultural or educational programmes.

The geography is therefore an almost perfect map of one country's twentieth century, and the sport's spread outside East Asia has been shallow for a reason that has nothing to do with cost — a soft tennis ball is cheap, the racket is cheap, and the court already exists in most countries because tennis is played on it.

What has not travelled is the reason to play it. Where tennis is available, soft tennis is a solution to a problem that country does not have.

Soft tennis exists because tennis balls were too expensive.

Tennis was introduced to Japan in the 1870s by Western teachers, and it ran immediately into a supply problem. Pressurised cloth-covered balls had to be imported, they cost a great deal, and they did not last — which made it impossible to spread the game through a school system that had no way to keep replacing them.

Around 1884 the answer was to substitute a soft, air-filled rubber ball that could be made domestically. The change was economic, not sporting, and the intention was to preserve the game rather than to alter it.

It altered it completely. A thirty-gram rubber ball loses speed quickly and deforms against the strings, so it cannot be hit through an opponent. Power stopped being a weapon. Rallies lengthened. The serve ceased to dominate. And the racket had to change too — lighter, softly strung — at which point the two games could no longer be played with each other's equipment.

By the time tennis balls were readily available in Japan, the country had a different sport with its own technique, its own scoring and its own school structure, and no reason to abandon it. Soft tennis spread into Korea and Taiwan during the period of Japanese rule and took root in both.

The International Soft Tennis Federation was formed in 1974, and the sport became an Asian Games medal event at Beijing in 1990 — the same edition that admitted kabaddi, sepak takraw and wushu.

One object, substituted for economic reasons, and a hundred and forty years of consequences.

The ball is hollow air-filled rubber, about 30 grams and 6.6 centimetres across, with no felt covering. A tennis ball is roughly twice the weight, is pressurised, and is covered in a nap that grips the strings and the court. Every difference between the two sports descends from that comparison.

A soft ball decelerates fast, so the court plays larger. It deforms on impact, so it stays on the strings longer and spin behaves differently. It cannot be driven flat past a competent opponent, so points must be built rather than struck.

The racket followed the ball. Soft tennis rackets are considerably lighter than tennis rackets and strung at much lower tension — a stiff string bed would simply fail to control a soft ball, and a heavy frame is unnecessary when there is no pace to absorb. Modern frames are graphite and composite, as tennis's are, but the specifications went in a different direction from the same starting point.

That divergence is what made the split permanent. A soft tennis racket cannot usefully play tennis and a tennis racket cannot usefully play soft tennis, so there was never a point at which the two could quietly merge back.

This site records several equipment substitutions — synthetic for rattan in sepak takraw, steel for wood in boules, resin for urethane in bowling. Every one of those reproduced or improved what came before. This is the only case where a substitution made for cost produced a different sport and both survived.

Soft tennis is governed competently, played by a small number of countries very seriously, and has almost no prospect of going further — and its federation appears to have made peace with that.

The ISTF was formed in 1974, ninety years after the sport was invented, because until then it had been essentially Japanese. Its membership grew from the countries where the game had been carried during the period of Japanese rule — Korea and Taiwan — into a wider Asian and then international membership.

The Asian Games place from 1990 is the sport's institutional foundation, and the company it entered in is instructive. Kabaddi, sepak takraw, wushu and soft tennis were all admitted at the same Games: four sports with deep regional participation, no global federation weight, and no realistic Olympic route. The Asian Games programme exists to hold exactly that category, and this site has now covered all four.

The Olympic question barely arises. Tennis is already on the programme, has been since 1896 with an interruption, and occupies the slot any racket-and-ball argument would have to be made in. A second tennis, played with a softer ball and contested seriously by three countries, is not a proposition anyone is making.

What the federation does instead is spread the game as a school and community sport, where its accessibility is a genuine asset — a slow, soft, cheap ball is a good way to introduce racket sport to children, which is what it was invented for in the first place.

Soft tennis has one of the quietest legislative histories on this site, and the reason is worth recording as much as the absence.

The substitution itself. The only decision that ever mattered, made around 1884 for cost reasons, and never reversed. When imported tennis balls became affordable, Japan had already built a different sport with its own technique and its own school structure, and there was no constituency for going back.

Doubles or singles. Codifying doubles as the principal format was a recognition of practice rather than a controversy — doubles puts twice as many students on the same number of courts, which is why the school system had always favoured it. It does mean the sport's flagship event is the one tennis treats as secondary, which affects how it reads to anyone encountering it from outside.

Scoring. The four-point game predates international codification and has not been rewritten. That is genuinely unusual: badminton, volleyball, table tennis and fistball all rewrote their scoring between 1999 and 2006 for broadcast, severing their own statistics. Soft tennis, with far more to gain from television exposure than any of them, did not.

Internationalising a Japanese sport. The 1974 federation had to write one rulebook across Japan, Korea and Taiwan, where the game had developed for decades under separate national bodies. It was a reconciliation rather than a dispute, and it is the moment the sport stopped being one country's.

There has been no safety controversy, no equipment arms race and no doping scandal of any scale — which for a sport of this age is a notably clean record, and follows from a ball that cannot hurt anybody.

Recorded as unsettled.

Whether the sport has a case beyond Asia. Soft tennis is cheap, safe, easy to learn and played on courts that already exist worldwide. It has still not spread, because in most countries tennis occupies the same space and there is no supply problem to solve. Whether the federation can find a different argument — as a school introduction to racket sport, principally — is its central strategic question.

Doubles as the flagship. Sensible for participation, unusual for a racket sport, and it makes the game read oddly to anyone arriving from tennis. Whether singles should be promoted for visibility is argued.

Scoring for television. Four-point games are short and legible and the sport has never rewritten them. Five comparable sports on this site did rewrite theirs between 1999 and 2006 and severed their statistics doing it. Whether soft tennis was wise or merely overlooked is a genuine question.

Living beside tennis. The two share a court and an ancestry, and one of them has been Olympic since 1896. Any argument for soft tennis has to explain why a second racket-and-ball sport on the same court is worth a place, and no version of that argument has worked.

Depth. Three countries take it seriously. That is enough for excellent competition and not enough for any universality claim, and there is no obvious route to changing it.