Can somebody tell me if I am getting better at tennis?

Track and Field, Basketball, Soccer, Baseball, Football, Cricket, and Golf all use analytics to improve individual and team performances. Analytics is used to speed up improvement by recognizing what crucial areas will result in the best outcome. Analytics keeps athletes focused, can spot the best patterns, builds confidence under pressure, confirms or denies hunches, focuses athletes on the process instead of the outcome, and provides excellent scouting reports. All these lead to a more complete and confident athletic performance in shorter time.  

The Tennis Industry currently lags behind all other sports, but the sun is rising on our courts. Our top premier players and tournaments are using companies like Golden Set Analytics, SAP, Infosys, and IBM's WatsonX to educate and involve players and fans the world over. For the average player, all these services are financially out of reach, but they are setting the benchmark and are focusing us on the advantages of using data to enhance performance.

Currently, if you search your App Store, there are dozens of apps for smartphones that allow a person to enter the data manually and get information "live" during the match. At the high school and college level, a coach can use this information to get your player focused and turn the match around. Most all apps track the stats on both players, so while charting one player you are also getting the information on the opponent. These "scouting" reports come in very handy later in the season or in future tournaments where the players meet again. Other systems allow you to video a match from your smartphone or a camera mounted on the fence. Although these are fully automated, you may or may not get the stats live depending on the system. All the above are reasonably priced but do have a fee for interpreting. At the top, there are far more automated systems, but they require you to find a tennis center that has the court set up with cameras in place ready for you to drill or play. Among these sophisticated systems, they may call lines, tell you the height of the ball over the net, the speed of shots and their locations as well as  give you a video and a healthy dose of analytics.

The smartphone allowed the birth of apps that can make the development of tennis players  faster by avoiding all the trial and error approaches that most players go through. No different from a runner, they can tell you just how good you are at the starting point and accurately track progress. They can give you accurate data about your strengths and weaknesses and give you the ability to take positive action on advancing your game. They will not tell you how to improve and are no substitute for a coach/parent who makes those decisions. Not only do these apps point our where you are, their analytics capabilities permit you to see your incremental improvements, not in months, but in days.

Stats and analytics apps are threading their way into the lives of tennis players, families and coaches. Search the Apple or Google Stores for Tennis Analytics or Tennis Stats and scroll through a dozen or so apps both FREE and subscription based that are offering their own take on player performances, all different and vary in ease of use, ad ons, number and kind of stats. Some require you to use your finger to tap on the court displayed on your phone, others just tap on buttons, some allow you to broadcast to friends, while others show a player's position, shot placement, shot speeds, height above the net and it goes on. The analytics app forest is not easy to negotiate and it takes patience to find an app that meets your needs. Some are simple to use, and give you basic information, while other grow progressively more complicated and require more time investment to use , but produce more sophisticated information.  A word here, in order to avoid the frustration that might deter you from even using analytics, you might elect to start with something easy and as you require more information, change apps.

Why, you might ask, have you not heard of these tools at your club or in the many tennis publications? Not only has tennis analytics missed you, but on a whole, they have not been noticed by the tennis industry. You might search the tennis organizations and leading bodies for this information and sorry to say, you will find little to nothing.

Pros find it difficult to take time away from the club to go to tournament to watch their charges perform, and even if they go they can't watch them all. This is where parents and friends come in; they have an invaluable role in doing the legwork as usual, and in this case, they do the charting, then sending it to the pro immediately after the match. Some apps allow the broadcasting of the match live, which in that case, the pro can see the match live wherever s/he is. Apps on your phone can provide invaluable insights to players in competition and under pressure. It isn't unusual that under these conditions that players lack the confidence to follow through with what they can do on the practice court, and without someone doing the charting, the only information the coach gets is the score. Any of the apps you find will provide the numbers on areas of Serve, Return, Groundstrokes and Net Play, just the information that allows the coach to follow up with an efficient and personalized developmental plan.

Players seldom argue with data, in fact data gives them a real and objective appraisal of their game, so a player knows what they are good and and what to avoid under pressure. After a cooling off time, players look forward to seeing their stats and look forward to seeing their improvement in numbers. Take a player who is working on a change in a stroke and wonders if it is really working. Data will give them the answer quickly because data shows incremental improvements; they don't have to wait for a month to see the result. Data also can detect when a stroke is deteriorating; at which point, the coach can straighten it out long before it shows in their game.

Parents are the key ingredient in the development of an athlete as they know their child far better than anyone else, however, this can also lead to misunderstandings and poor communication. Parents are often blamed for getting too involved, and can, if not educated, torpedo a players progress. As we know, children are not miniature adults, therefore it is vitally important for the parent to be on the same page as the player and coach; charting or videoing puts them in this most useful role. Being in sync as a member of the "team", they can provide the support needed to improve the journey of building a successful and healthy athlete.

There are a plethora of apps for parents and coaches in the app stores for most other sports and these apps are providing a healthy pathway for families of athletes of all ages and abilities. Tennis is catching up, but won't be complete until all the tennis entities begin to promote the apps and what they can do for tennis players, parents and coaches. To start the ball rolling, ask your club coach about apps for analytics because they may just use what you are looking for. Those of us involved at the organizational level, should also bring attention to this tool. Of course it isn't the only tool for tennis players development, but it is a wholly underutilized tool and can make the difference between a player keeping that initial excitement and the wall of frustration that kills it. As a commercial once said, "TRY IT YOU MIGHT LIKE IT".

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Written by: Andy Durham, Founder of RacketStats. Photos: RacketStats / Facebook. For more information, email: info@RacketStats.com.