As any sports fan can tell you there are thousands of statistics about their favorite players, sports, and tournaments. These statistics are used to tell a story throughout the course of a season or career to help them justify to their friends why Jerry Rice is not only the best wide receiver ever but rather the best player in NFL history or how LeBron James is a better player than Michael Jordan or why the Ohio State Buckeyes were a better team than the University of Alabama last college football season even though Alabama won the National Championship. Another term that could be used instead of statistics to prove these points is data.
Over the past decade you have seen sports such as baseball and the success of “Moneyball” where teams used large amounts of data to find undervalued players and sign them in order to compete more successfully against teams with more money. Over this time many professional sports leagues have used types of data analytics to increase and maintain fan support of the league by making their sport more exciting and interactive to fans because they are now able to explain the why of how a specific team or player is better and not just the what using math and patterns. Now the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) Tour is getting in on the action by partnering with IBM at their Grand Slam tournaments.
The ATP and IBM are doing this by creating an analytics tool called SlamTracker, which allows for 8 years of data and 41million data points per match to be used and analyzed. This information is available for players, coaches, broadcasters, and fans to use to help them figure out where they need to improve their game, what are the most important things to determining who will win a match, or why a specific player is better and not just that they are. According to the data SlamTracker has collected the reason Rafael Nadal is so dominant on clay is because his serve to the ad side on that surface is the single hardest shot to hit (based on the math) in all of tennis due to the small window there is for an opponent to return it. At the same time the reason Novak Djokovic had the best possible chance at beating Nadal of the entire field is because he is the best at hitting a high bouncing back hand return. Look for SlamTracker to again be used during Wimbledon later this month. By using SlamTracker and all of the data that is accumulated during matches the ATP is able to enhance the experience of the sport for both the players and fans and is an excellent example of the real world uses of Data Driven Innovation (DDI).
Denys Emmert is the Public Policy intern at SIIA. He has a degree in marketing and political science from Florida State University.