Improving understanding and performance within tennis

An opportunity to unlock the potential of tennis data

AWARD WINNERS & FINALISTS

In September 2024, TennisViz was thrilled to be announced as the winner of the Tech Breakthrough Award at the Leaders in Sport Awards in London. The award is recognition for the creation of the TennisViz Insights and the impact it has had across tennis.

Richard Hawkes, Managing Director of TennisViz, said:

“This award recognises the brilliant work and dedication to innovation of the TennisViz team and our partners. We’re delighted to have won the award, and congratulations to all the nominees and winners on the night.”

Our background

Tennis has been surviving on limited data recorded by the umpire (Umpire’s chair data/Level 1 data) and the data points which can be collected manually in real-time (Level 2) (e.g. the number of shots in the point). These two sources of data are the basis on which “traditional statistics” (e.g. break points won) have been created. However, traditional statistics are often a function of winning and do not explain how or why a player has been successful.

In 2018 we recognised the opportunity to unlock the potential of the rich data available in ball and player tracking data to create a collection of new dynamic performance metrics that would revolutionise our sport’s interest and understanding.

Capturing the data

Tennis is a fast-paced, chaotic sport which makes manually capturing accurate shot-level data in real-time extremely difficult. The early years of TennisViz were spent solving this challenge by developing the software that ingests and processes player and ball tracking data to calculate the following data points for every shot:

Shot Type: Analysing the stroke, direction, and spin to identify every shot played (for example, a Forehand topspin crosscourt or a Backhand short slice).
Shot Quality: Measuring the quality of a shot (0-10 scale) by analysing the spin, speed, width and depth.
The situation of play: Identifying whether the player is serving, returning, at the baseline or net during each shot.
Phase: Whether the player is in attack, neutral or defence when they hit their shot.
Tactics and Patterns of Play: Capturing every combination of shots the player uses.

Building new performance metrics

Our next challenge was creating a set of metrics to increase the levels of understanding and interest in tennis. The TennisViz Insights differ from traditional statistics by:

Using unique data points which have not been measured before.
Using Shot Level level data to provide a more comprehensive analysis.
Offering compelling new narratives by comparing a player’s performance with their season average, tour average or performance in previous rounds.
Creating dynamic data reveals the most interesting insights about the sport rather than presenting tables of generic statistics.
Linking in-play performance to the probability of winning.

Tailoring the Insights

Our ambition is that TennisViz Insights become the common tennis language. Whether you are a new fan engaging in tennis for the first time or a professional player preparing for an event.

While the underlying data remains the same, we understand the needs of a fan, broadcaster, or players are very different. We work continuously with all stakeholders in tennis to create new metrics and discover innovative ways of aggregating, presenting and visualising our data depending on the specific needs of each user.

Our history

‘Who is winning?’ It is the question that those uninitiated to cricket are told not to ask but it is the question that was the genesis of CricViz.