Simon Rea’s mission in the data and analytics space is simple.
"We want our Australians to beat the rest of the world,” he explained on The AO Show Weekly podcast earlier this year.
Yet there are few things simple about the work itself, an exercise in data mining, interpretation and translating that Rea describes as “art meeting science”.
Not all players connect with data-driven insights, and not all coaches work in the same way with the richness of data available to them. Rea and his team must determine exactly what’s required to maximise value for players and coaches – which can help them beat their opponent across the net tomorrow, or better understand their own game as they refine it over time.
“Typically we're dealing with the coach, who's then providing an additional layer of filtering before that info gets to the player. I think the first cab off the rank (for us) is to have a really good relationship with our high-performance coaches who are out there on the ground, year-round,” Rea explained.
"Some of them just want five full-match videos of the next opponent and they'll spend 15 hours going through that video. Some of them want a data-driven report accompanied by a translation in notes that cuts through to them: what stands out most based off a combination of vision, data and notes? And some are somewhere in between.”
World leaders
Rea, formerly an elite-level coach who worked with Nick Kyrgios and Sam Stosur, has for the past three years worked as Tennis Australia’s senior manager of game analysis.
The shift from coaching to analytics saw him enter a space that had already been thriving at TA for the better part of a decade.
"I'm really confident in saying Tennis Australia was absolutely at the forefront; we were first in the queue of realising the importance of analytics and the role this could play both then and into the future,” Rea declared.
"I think we were the first Grand Slam nation to think about it in this way: How can we secure more vision of wherever our players are playing from around the world, and work with that vision in an analytical fashion?
“What's happened in the decade since is that this whole industry, as with the sport, has gotten a lot more competitive and there's a whole bunch out there more hungry to get their hands on the ingredients, if you like, and then mine the insights out of that data.”
Players and their teams have never before encountered data as plentiful, rich and accessible. Several majors, including the Australian Open, now offer tablets to coaches for tracking real-time data as their player competes, which can inform their in-match coaching and strategy.
Australian players once enjoyed the advantage of Tennis Australia owning and governing its data from the AO and other summer events. Yet this is no longer unique among tennis federations.
TA’s data insights were once limited to its own tournaments, in January. Now, players can access data insights year-round, thanks to organisations like the ATP making ball- and player-tracking data available via a dashboard.
Should a player be drawn to face Novak Djokovic, his coach could access that ATP dashboard, view Djokovic’s past 50 matches, and glean all manner of insights – where he typically serves on the deuce court, where he likes to stand when returning, how many backhand winners and errors he makes, and more importantly, when.
“Where I think our team can do that really well,” Rea said, “is narrowing the focus on what is it, out of all that is available, that's most important or pertinent?”
How they do it
The team’s work in preparing players for specific opponents has been well received. "In certain matches the feedback from the coaching team on the ground has been: 'Wow, that was enormously helpful',” Rea reported.
“They just didn't have the time (to mine this data) because the match the night before finished at 9.30, so basically, they were in our hands. And I'm not saying we get it right all the time, but we might hear from a coach that the opponent’s forehand did start to break down; if they peppered it with a high-enough quality for long enough in the third set, the dam wall broke, and our prediction of what we thought may happen pre-match was brought to life."
Rea and his team also offer insights on a player’s own game.
Armed with this knowledge, players can work more intentionally on the practice court, address weaknesses and plot their assault on the tour when they resume competing.
"Players might say: ‘Hey, I feel like my game's changed over the last six months. Perhaps I was performing better when I was returning closer to the baseline, and I've tried to return from slightly deeper in the court on second-serve return – can you drill down for me on how that's going?’” Rea explained.
“(Or they might say) ‘When I'm trying to go out wide under pressure on my second serve, I just don't feel like I'm getting enough on that serve. Can you tell me if that's the case or not?’
"So we combine the gut feel of the player or the coach, and the insights out of the data. And we see whether there's alignment there, or whether there's perhaps some friction, and that elicits a conversation.”
Rea pointed to the recruitment of Olivia Cant to the team as especially helpful in this area. Given her expertise working with Hawkeye data, Cant could, hypothetically, analyse every match a player contests across a season, and highlight how they execute returns on pressure points versus non-pressure points – right down to the respective percentage of points that player wins, depending on where the return lands.
“Liv is so skilled with her coding and reporting that she can draw a little grey box in the area that's the 'danger zone' and highlight the problem for that player because, say, they might only be winning nine per cent of those returning points,” Rea said.
“The player would not necessarily be aware of this. Does that mean they need to be less risk-averse, and be more aggressive with their returning, accept making a few more errors, but at the same time turn the tables in their favour?
“If they do make those returns, more points can be on their terms, or more neutral, as compared to allowing their opponent to dictate.”
Taking advantage
One player tapping into these insights is Storm Hunter.
The former doubles world No.1 was hurtling towards the top 100 in singles early in 2024 before injury cruelly halted her progress. But both before and after that moment, Hunter has benefitted from data analytics, an approach driven by her coach Nicole Pratt.
“I don't know a coach that's any more data-informed or better-prepared for the opposition than Pratty,” Rea commented.
Hunter and Pratt felt that Hunter’s serve – especially her second delivery – was vulnerable to being punished. So, ahead of the 2024 Australian summer they spent the off-season working to maintain her serve speed under both pressure and fatigue.
It paid dividends. She won three qualifying rounds to reach the Australian Open main draw then progressed to the last 32, where she pushed No.9 seed Barbora Krejcikova to three sets.
“The stats showed I wasn't getting put under pressure from a second serve return as much, and my paces were higher than they were the year before,” Hunter told ausopen.com.
"I think because we really only (tracked data) for summer, and I had such a positive experience, it kind of just reaffirmed what I do well – holding the centre of the court, being able to change direction, and take balls early, and just execute really well. It affirmed how I'm going to play to my strengths and how I'm going to win matches.
“It just made it very clear that this is my game style, I don't need to over-complicate it. I just need to do these things well.”
Hunter won 14 of her first 19 singles matches in 2024 and slashed her ranking from world No.180 to No.114 before rupturing her Achilles at the Billie Jean King Cup in April. Yet data analysis is again proving a valuable tool as she works toward a comeback.
Using data from that same summer period, Rea and his team have provided Hunter with insights such as the distance she covered during points and matches, her top running speed, the areas of the court where she sprinted, and how many sprints she was doing each match.
"We have all the markers of what's a really high load for me,” Hunter explained, “and what they also did was provide footage of my maximum sprints – mostly running forwards to chase drop shots – so I could visualise how this looked compared to my lateral movement.
“One thing that came out of it was, across my six matches, roughly 70 per cent of my movement was at lower speeds [1-3 metres per second] while only 10 per cent of my movement was at higher speeds [4+ metres per second].
“When we then looked at how far I travelled to get to each shot, we saw that 80 per cent of the time it was between 1-3 metres. So I was like, oh that's great, I don't really need to run that fast or that far (laughter).
HUNTER: From “happy to be on court” to world No.1
“Although I'm not moving much right now, just where I'm at with my rehab, all of this confirmed that inner-range type movements [characterised by short distances] is actually the most important part of my game. It can be easy to think, 'oh, I'm just hitting up and down the middle' but I've got to be mentally switched-on from the first ball, because so much of what I’m doing on game day is right in that movement zone. And that's a strength of mine, to dictate through the middle.
"Even though I'm still off where I need to be for singles, it's really made my training more specific. And when I've got the all-clear to run and cover more court, we don't need to be doing five kilometres, which is different to, say, Alex de Minaur – he would have to cover a lot more court and be moving a lot more.”
Insights on the road
As Hunter rehabbed, Rea and Cant departed Australia, travelling with players and their teams to provide real-time insights.
Remember those tablets we mentioned, available for Grand Slam matches? Rea took advantage of this as he sat courtside next to Andrew Roberts – Adam Walton’s coach – at Wimbledon in July.
The previous year, this Wimbledon data was not made available in real time, whereas in 2024 it was, allowing Rea to offer insights to Roberts as Walton scored his first Grand Slam main-draw win over Federico Coria.
"I'm logging on, and just having a conversation with Robbo saying: ‘Hey, here's what I'm seeing from the data. And he can choose to ignore it, say 'thanks very much, I'll check in with you again at the end of the next set'. Or he could take that info, distill it into his language that he uses with Walton, and direct that instruction to him as Walton comes to his corner at the start of a set,” Rea explained.
“Robbo told me afterwards how invaluable it was to have the insights from the team on hand, mid match. He could have his tablet open and be checking it, but he's not really in the headspace to be focusing on it when he's also gotta be maintaining eye contact with Walton.”
It’s a resource Rea says is catching on among the coaching fraternity; in-match tablet usage at Australian Open 2024 spiked significantly compared with 12 months earlier at AO 2023.
Where to next?
With the wealth of information now readily available – and the insights this offers – the data analytics space is now more open and competitive than ever.
Rea believes the emergence of the ATP dashboard has supercharged this evolution; coaches now have an enhanced ability to track players' preferences, patterns and shot quality. “We knew that earlier, but only from our Australian Open data. Now, the players are able to login and see who's playing, say, Washington DC this week, and what they did,” he said.
“We can log in live, or we can log in after the fact, and we can see everything. Wherever there's a ball-and-player tracking file – I reckon 85 per cent of the events on the ATP Tour now – we can see everyone. And so can everyone else.
"My sense is that it's going to be about who's best at maximising the value that exists, or explaining what's most important in this enormous pool of data – they’re going to be the cream that rises to the top.”
New tools are being developed all the time, further deepening that data pool.
Rea’s team have recently tapped into skeletal data; at Australian Open 2024 this helped them better understand players’ serving biomechanics and how this correlated with performance.
RELATED: New data reveals Australian Open super servers
ATP players are now also allowed to compete using wearable technology, which Rea says opens up even more possibilities.
“Previously that's been a huge gap in the sport – you could wear it in training if you wanted to understand certain metrics but you couldn’t wear it in a match,” he said.
“Alistair Murphy and the team at the National Tennis Academy are leading the way here in terms of the wearable tech being best utilised from a daily training environment perspective and we’re keen to help here. Can we visualise that data? Can we play a role in helping our Australian players understand that data, and how their training compares to a match?
"We might find their load in training is not high enough to sufficiently prepare for a match, or perhaps they’re considerably over-training and are at an injury risk.
“That's probably the next frontier, and I think Al’s team is really well positioned.”