Reliability, Validity and Sensitivity of Newly Developed Tennis-Specific Reactive Agility Tests

Abstract

Agility is one of the motor skills on which success in tennis performance depends, and the aim of this research was the development and validation of a new test for assessing preplanned and reactive agility in young tennis players. The sample of respondents comprised 50 young competitors with an average age of 12.34 ± 1.22 years who were ranked up to 50th in the national tennis association ranking and up to 300th in the international Tennis Europe ranking. Agility variables were measured with newly constructed tests for the assessment of preplanned agility (CODS) and reactive agility (RAG), which were constructed in such a way that subjects imitated specific movements in tennis. It can be concluded that the newly constructed tests of preplanned agility (CODS) and reactive agility (RAG) have a high degree of reliability. Additionally, the assumption that the reliability will be slightly higher for preplanned agility tests (CA = 0.92 and 0.92; ICC = 0.86 and 0.82) than for reactive agility tests (CA = 0.90 and 0, 89; ICC = 0.74 and 0.72) was proven to be accurate. The results also showed that the tests have satisfactory validity. Thus, the results of both tests show a good correlation (p = 0.6 and p = 0.55) with the T-test of agility. It can be noted that all measurements, that is, all results, are normally distributed and that the values of skewness and kurtosis are within acceptable limits. We can confirm satisfactory sensitivity and their applicability to the sample of young tennis players. In conclusion, the results of this research confirmed the hypothesis and showed that the newly constructed agility tests have extremely good metric characteristics, especially the reactive agility test. Thus, this paper proposed a new procedure for the assessment of preplanned and reactive agility in young tennis players, which will significantly improve and advance the existing procedures, and make the results more reliable and precise.