Want to be a tennis professional? According to data from Tennis Australia’s Game Insight Group (GIG), who are developing a range of innovative metrics for measuring player performance, it all comes down to getting the early years right. On this front, GIG says that fast-rising Australian Ash Barty is ticking all the boxes.
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Barty initially made her mark as a promising teenager, winning junior Wimbledon and embarking on a professional career before taking an 18-month break from the game in 2014, in which she played cricket for Brisbane Heat in the Twenty20 Women's Big Bash League (WBBL).
In what was a phenomenal return last year – starting primarily in doubles – Barty rocketed to world No.17 from outside the top 300. With a title win in Malaysia and finals berths in Wuhan and Birmingham, the 21-year-old posted wins over top-10 players including Johanna Konta, Garbine Muguruza, Jelena Ostapenko and Karolina Pliskova.
In 2018, and now sitting as Australia’s top-ranked player, Barty has already made the final at the Sydney International, and now looks poised for her best run at a Slam.
Barty grew up in Ipswich, an urban region in south-east Queensland approximately 40 kilometres west of Brisbane’s city centre. Traditional sports science says that growing up in a regional centre can have significant advantages and, according to GIG, such a location provides more access to a large range of good quality facilities, coaches and opposition than small country towns or even larger city centres. Additionally, Ipswich falls into a sweet spot in population size where individual success can be broadly celebrated (the ‘birthplace’ effect), but numbers still remain large enough to provide healthy competition.
At the age of five, Barty found an old racquet in a shed at her home and started hitting a ball into a brick wall for hours on end. While starting to play tennis in your early primary school years is seen as optimal, GIG data explains further that early exposure to hand-eye skills is vitally important, but makes the point that it should not be solely focused on a single sport. Not only did Barty excel as a professional cricketer, she also has a golf handicap of just 10.
GIG suggests that Barty’s unstructured style of play against the brick wall is similar to that of Australian cricket legend Don Bradman – his childhood game of using a cricket stump to hit a golf ball against corrugated iron is the stuff of Aussie folklore.
Sports science also discusses the coaches need to emphasise variability in practice, with GIG suggesting a need to practice solving problems as opposed to repeating solutions. They expand by highlighting the fact that many tennis players practice too much “massed repetition” in a bid to find a non-existent “perfect stroke”.
Interestingly, Barty’s junior coach, Jim Joyce, would often challenge her with new and unpredictable shot combinations such as forcing a chip-slice backhand, then quickly switch to a volley – requiring Barty to practise her transition.
When it comes to match play and competition in the formative years, sports science is clear that this is a more fundamental aspect than practice. For Barty, with her parents’ blessing, coach Joyce rigged early carnivals where she was dominant, ensuring she would lose the final. She was also held back from the junior tournament circuit. GIG explains that chasing “wins” early on limits the development of a game style that will be successful in senior competition, and contributes to a “fixed” rather than “growth” mindset.
Barty was consistently also pitted against older and better players, a move that both science and GIG concur upon. As a nine-year-old, Barty played against 15-year-old boys, and at 12 was already playing adult males.
GIG says that this helps young sportspeople to learn the adult game from an early age and challenges them to develop fully; physically, mentally, tactically and technically.
After the completion of the first round at Melbourne Park this year, Barty ranks second for hitting adaptability, with her experience of unstructured play and early learning of varied shot combinations on display (adaptability refers to the capacity of a player to adapt their stroke play to the demands imposed within a point, measured by determining the amount of variation in ball trajectory and court position).
Any way you slice it, Barty looks to have had all the bases covered from the outset. Next up in the second round? Italian Camila Giorgi at Rod Laver Arena on Thursday night.