What data is making a real difference on the ATP Tour with Tom Corrie

Episode 270: What data is making a real difference on the ATP Tour with Tom Corrie

 

DISCLAIMER: Please note we use a transcription service, so there may be some errors in the following transcript for the episode. If you can, refer to the audio for the exact quotations.

 

Dan Kiernan (00:00)

Welcome to episode 268 of Control the Controllables. And today we have Tom Corrie. Now, Tom is the head of performance, media and broadcast at TennisViz. Anybody that is on social media will also have seen Tennis Insights. For anyone that loves following tennis, it's very fan friendly. They're now giving ratings to players on selected shots.

So if you're picking up things on social media that say Alcaraz's shot was a 9.5 on his forehand today, that's where it's come from. It's come from TennisViz, and Tom is a big, big part of that. It's trying to revolutionise the way we look at tennis. For so long, tennis has been behind. It hasn't been a data-driven sport, and Tom and the team alongside him are making a big, big difference, working very closely with the ATP.

And I go back a long way with Thomas, certainly with the Corrie family. Tom is the son of Martin Corrie, who was the president of the LTA. He is the brother of Dave and Ed. Dave used to play US college tennis at the same time as myself, so he must be pretty old.

And Ed Corrie was one of the top British singles players; he played Wimbledon. Many of you will have watched Ed over the years. And his mum plays tennis to a good level as well. So it's very much a tennis family.

Tom's someone who really comes off the page. By his own admission, like myself, he's a tennis nerd, a tennis geek. He loves all of this stuff. I love the data side of the game, and I think you'll really enjoy the way he talks through it and explains what's going on.

And obviously he gets to the nitty-gritty stuff that we love as well, right? The differences between Sinner and Alcaraz, which I think will grab everyone's imagination. Fonseca, a name that's coming through.

Now, what you will find is that we're talking about the men's game throughout the conversation, and apologies for that. As you know, I work on the WTA tour, and at Control the Controllables we want to bring absolute equality across the board in terms of what we're talking about.

As it stands, TennisViz only have a contract with the ATP, so they don't have the data on the WTA side yet. But that is still to come, and we'll get him back on to discuss that as well, because I certainly have lots of questions in my head about the WTA side, and also the doubles side. So without further ado, I'm going to pass you over to today's fantastic guest, Tom Corrie.

Dan Kiernan (02:46)

So Tom Corrie, a big welcome to Control the Controllables. How are you doing?

Tom Corrie (02:50)

Dan, thanks for having me on. Great to be here.

Dan Kiernan (02:53)

Hey, I looked at my notes. As I said off air, I try and research as best I can for these chats. And I had an email sent to myself that said "Tom Corrie, May 25th", and I had about seven questions written out. So this has been a long time coming, which I guess is kind of typical of the tennis world. But thank you so much for giving your time.

And as ever, Tom, I guess the starting point at Control the Controllables is that I want to get to know you. This is your episode. There's lots we can jump into. Anyone in British tennis will know the Corrie name; it's a famous name.

I only knew you existed because I was told you were renting a room off my brother's best friend, many, many years ago. I knew Dave, because he was your oldest brother and he was my age, and then obviously I knew Ed as well. And then someone said to me, yeah, some Corrie is renting a room off one of your brother's best friends.

Anyway, I now know much more about you, and I hope by the end of this even more. But tell me, of the three, you're the middle one?

Tom Corrie (04:11)

The middle. I'm the lost middle, as you said, like many people.

Dan Kiernan (04:17)

I found you somewhere. Take me back all those years to the Corrie household and how tennis looked back in those days.

Tom Corrie (04:24)

Yeah, sure. Before we do that, can I just say, firstly, thanks for having me on. Secondly, I wanted to say a big congrats to you on the various outlets you've been involved in. Firstly, the move to take an academy to Spain from Britain is probably not a well-walked path, and you guys seem to have pulled it off with great success. So congrats on that.

Second, the podcast is really cool. You're a British coach, and I know you're now a podcaster, but your background is all coaching and tennis, and to have such a successful thing there is really cool. And thirdly, being a Grand Slam coach is nothing to be sniffed at.

One of the things I wanted to talk about is understanding the level, which is now what I do for a living, obviously. But even before that, understanding the level of the top pros, whether it's singles, doubles, male or female, and then trying to inspire other coaches to realise that the level, whilst it's extremely high, and I don't want to downgrade tennis, is actually obtainable for Brits and people like yourself.

And there are various others now, particularly on the doubles side, but singles as well, with Emma, Andy, Cam, Katie, all those people. Jacob now, beating Griekspoor yesterday. There are many players coming through who can play at the very top of the game and do things that, when I was growing up, we didn't think were actually possible.

We didn't really believe, and we'll get on to my family now, that one of us could be in the later rounds of a Grand Slam. And we were right, none of us were. But that's something that's becoming more and more common amongst Brits.

There's no reason that, if you're good... you have to be good, and you have to work hard and do all the hours and all the stuff you've spoken about with your other guests. But if you are good, you can achieve great things in this game, and you and other coaches are proof of that. So, sorry, I just wanted to get that out of the way at the beginning.

Dan Kiernan (06:30)

It's very kind, Tom. It's very kind of you to say. And to pick up quickly on the point you made at the end, I fully agree with that. Taking my personal experience, I don't think I would have had the opportunities to achieve what I've achieved if I'd stayed in the UK at that time. And I think that's changing. I do think that's absolutely changing.

One thing I've learned over the last 15, 20 years is that tennis is an entrepreneurial sport, and maybe we've been guilty of putting people in boxes. My upbringing felt almost quite boxed off: that's what you do now, that's what you can achieve. No, no, you can't hit with those players, they're in a different box. You're a doubles player now. You only coach under-12 players. It felt a little bit that way.

And now that you get the opportunity to do it, you realise everyone's a human. Everyone's got the same issues. Everyone's got relationship problems, anger problems, doubts, fears, all of these things. Yet if, day in, day out, you put the work in, turn up, show up and bring your best self as often as you can, then the world's your oyster a little bit.

It's certainly been inspirational seeing all of those stories across the board. I think this week, what, five of the top 10 ATP doubles players in the world are from Great Britain, and so many amazing things. It's a pleasure to be a little part of that.

But the Corries, come on, let's not get me too off track here. I'm not used to compliments as a director of an academy, and as a podcaster I'm not used to compliments either. So I ended up talking about that. But back, back, back to the Corrie family.

Tom Corrie (08:27)

So the Corries are one of these families where Mum and Dad, the story they tell us, which obviously I wasn't around to fact check, met playing tennis when they were 16 years old or something daft like that, in Rickmansworth or somewhere. They both loved the game. They both played their whole lives. They both played county tennis many a time, and were involved in county and club tennis through volunteer positions. And then three boys.

One of the things I like saying is I genuinely feel we all got into it organically, to the point where we probably didn't have a choice. I have no memory of ever being forced to play, and I don't think either of my brothers does.

My older brother's best level was college in the States, a similar sort of time to you, I guess. Division One college tennis. Then he played Futures, back when there were still satellites, for a while, and got an okay ranking.

I was less good, because I was the lost child for a little bit and had a few years off tennis. I went to college in the States, played D1 tennis for a bit, and then played county men's level, still until now. And then my younger brother got to around 200 ATP, and I coached him for a while, which I'm sure we'll come on to. Ed was the best player.

So it was a classic. We all went to the club as kids, because Mum and Dad were playing tennis matches. You'll know, and I'm sure everyone knows, the Sunday afternoon matches, which I've played endless of, where you play three doubles, so it's like six, seven hours at a club.

They were playing and we were just there. It was a nice club where we just roamed around, playing tennis for hours, getting conkers off the tree, playing short tennis, playing table tennis, playing pool in the clubhouse. That was our life.

So there are no memories of, you need to go and play tennis, you need to run, you need to do all this. It was just, well, we like tennis, go and play, have lessons. Of course we did have lessons. Ed was the best; he was on national academy-style stuff back then with the LTA. Me and Dave were just bumbling around lessons and local academies. I just remember whacking balls into the tree, like people do.

Dan Kiernan (10:40)

Picking conkers was your S&C programme. Climbing up, there's your shoulder stability. This is the thing, all right?

Tom Corrie (10:52)

Yeah, but we were all fit-ish, to a point. Anyway, we can get to that. But that was our background. And Mum and Dad have stayed very, very involved. Dad got to the point... People don't understand this with the volunteer stuff, but it's 100% volunteer, never paid a penny. But he got to the point where at one stage he was the president of the LTA.

They get nice perks. He went to loads of tournaments, but they never get paid a penny.

Dan Kiernan (11:22)

I drank champagne with them, or maybe it was a beer, in Málaga at the Davis Cup. It's always nice to see them.

Tom Corrie (11:28)

Yeah, they're very involved. He was very involved with the ITF through the LTA and after the LTA, and Mum was, until very recently, very, very involved with Herts Tennis, where we grew up. So they've been in it. They couldn't love the game more, and I really mean that. They can chew anyone's ear off about tennis, for any amount of time, in a positive way.

So they love it, and we're a product of that. I'm still very much, as we'll come on to, working not on the court, but day in, day out in tennis now, in tennis data. Ed and Dave don't work in tennis anymore, but Ed's still involved, touch wood, through his playing ability and his relationships, as a member at the All England Club. So he still plays matches and is very involved, and we all still play county tennis. So yeah, we're just one of those families.

Dan Kiernan (12:24)

One of the things I was going to say: anyone that's a regular listener to Control the Controllables knows I've got a theory, I've got a lot of rubbish theories, which is why we need people like you in the world, right? Because what you do takes away the fluff that some of us tennis-coach theorists can have, okay?

Now, I don't know if you can give me any data on this one, but my theory is that the third child is a great place to be. I don't know if that's a bit of confirmation bias, because I'm the third child in my family, I'm the third boy. So I was going to say to you, as the middle boy, what happened? How did the second one manage to... now I've got that.

The research I haven't done is on age, because I've now found out that Ed ended up around 200 in the world in singles, 140 in doubles, a very, very good player in his own right. You were also a world-ranked tennis player. So all three of you being world-ranked tennis players is no mean feat.

Is there something in my theory that the third child maybe plays around the club a little bit earlier, picks up those skills a little bit earlier, is able to hit the conker from distance and be more accurate a little bit earlier? Is there anything in my theory? Come on, back me up here.

Tom Corrie (13:43)

Well, I don't have the data on that, but I think there's definitely sound theory in younger siblings having more of an advantage when it comes to stuff like that. In our case, it was as simple as: he got to hit with me, and he soon overtook me, but for a while I was better than him. I got to hit with Dave, and Dave had to hit with Dad, which is obviously less fun when you're younger.

You play with your brothers, and we can get into the theory, if we have time, about whether it's better to play up, at your same level or down, from a coaching standpoint. But there are definitely advantages: if you hit a ball and it comes back from the other side more often, that helps you. Whereas if you're the older brother hitting with younger brothers, the ball doesn't come back. So I'm in.

Dan Kiernan (14:34)

What's the age difference between you boys?

Tom Corrie (14:37)

Roughly three years each. I'm 40. Yeah, there are three years between each of us.

Dan Kiernan (14:41)

Right, okay. Which is quite significant, I guess, as well. If you think about Ed, he's probably been exposed to the sport of tennis at two, while Dave's eight and you're five. That's quite a significant exposure. For me, my theory is based a bit more on exposure.

We then think someone's more talented because they've maybe had more exposure and more reps at a younger age. They're only five and they're doing that, and he's eight and doing that. Well, yeah, but they've probably played similar amounts of tennis. So it is an interesting one.

But I want to move you on, because I do want to get to TennisViz and Tennis Insights, which many people will know, and do a bit of a deeper dive on that. But you're downplaying your tennis a little bit as the lost child. You were a good tennis player and you played to a good level. You went to US college; I believe you spent four years in US college. Monmouth was where you went.

Tom Corrie (15:54)

I did two colleges, and I finished at a D1 in New Jersey called Monmouth.

Dan Kiernan (15:58)

I know that university, because we had a player from the academy there a few years ago. So tell us about that. Was that always an obvious journey for you? Dave had already done it; I remember playing Dave, or certainly being around Dave, in US college. Was that always the idea for you? How did that come about?

I think for a lot of people listening to these podcasts, that's obviously become a big part of tennis now. And we know from a statistical point of view that in the main draws at Grand Slams now, probably about 20% of the men's singles players are former US college players. On the women's side it's a little less, but it's still six or seven players on average.

In doubles, we're looking at almost 50% of the draws being US college players. So tell us a little bit more about that part of your story.

Tom Corrie (16:52)

We don't have to look any further than Rinderknech and Vacherot, if everyone's listening. So good.

Dan Kiernan (16:56)

Wow. And how amazing was that? So that's the question: when's the movie going to be made?

Tom Corrie (17:05)

Yeah, exactly. Well, we've got the data to back it up. They both played bloody well. But yeah, so college tennis. Before Mum gets in, I just want to quash this lost child thing now. The only reason I said that is because there was a point when we were younger when everybody, because they were better than me, went...

Oh yeah, I know Dave, I know Ed, which one are you? So there was that. But in the last 10, 15 years, that's kind of faded, because I was coaching and I'm now way more in the tennis world than they are.

But yeah, I did have a period, which is why I said that, in my early teens, when I fell out of love with the game and basically played a lot of rugby and did skateboarding, just normal things that normal kids were doing. Instead of training five days a week, like everybody does if they want to be good, I was training next to nothing for a few years.

Then I fell back in love with it later in my teens, and I was way behind at that stage, compared to them or other top national players. When I was younger, there were names you'll all know, Guy Thomas, Neil Roskilly; they were Herts boys. I still play county tennis with them now. The gap went from being chalk and cheese to me being basically the same level as them.

So I fell out of love with it for a little bit, but then I fell back in love, played loads, managed to sort of blag my way into a US uni, the first college I went to, and then slowly closed the gap and improved a lot over there.

And yeah, I'm a huge fan of the US college system because of my own experiences. As we said, two brothers did it as well, and endless players have done it, and now it's a standard part of the pathway. But Dave and you and those guys... I'm 40, Dave's 43, you were fairly early in that. It wasn't normal even at my age, and that's 20 years ago. I went from 2004 to 2008.

Dan Kiernan (19:15)

It was a failure. It took me a long time to accept that I was a failed tennis player. I was going to LSU, who, in the year I was supposed to go, were ranked number two in the country, and we were ranked number one in the country for most of the year.

Yet I was going genuinely with the mindset of, my God, Dan, you've messed this up, you're not good enough. That's kind of how it was delivered: look, it's not really going how we thought it was going to go, so maybe you can go to the number one NCAA-ranked tennis team in America.

And to be honest, after two weeks of being there, I very quickly realised it wasn't a failure. Now I realise how lucky I was to have "failed" and to have got that opportunity. So it's amazing how it has changed.

How influential were your parents on that? With all three of you going through that system, was it something they'd had experience of, or did it just happen that all of you had your own journeys that took you that way?

Tom Corrie (20:41)

They were influential in that they were very open to it. I don't have memories of them pushing for a second. It was driven by us wanting to play more tennis, and them going, right, this is the most affordable way. That was a big part of it.

It was just the most affordable way to continue to train in a professional environment, where you could get two, three hours of tennis a day put on for you, and all the stuff you've talked about before: strength and conditioning coaches, travel.

If we'd stayed in England back then... I know university tennis in Britain has moved on a lot, but I don't think it was at a stage back then where, unless you went to one of the top unis, which I wasn't going to get into, Loughborough or Bath or whatever, there was a professional tennis environment to keep chasing your dream.

I mean, I was way off the level, but I still thought at that point I could maybe be really, really good. So that's what kept it all going. And Ed was similar to you. He went to UT, who were one of the best in the country, and Lloyd Glasspool went shortly after him. Was he one of your boys?

And yeah, Ed had the same feeling, that he had failed, because he had tried to play Futures and wasn't good enough. But I do remember Dad, and the story I believe is true is that Dad stepped in and said, look, you're going to travel around playing Futures, essentially spending money that's going to run out.

And Futures is not a good environment if you don't have a really good, supportive coach and you don't see a path out of it. Whereas you can go to college, and they're going to pay for the vast majority of it, because he was good, and you're going to get all these opportunities.

Then you can have another go at playing Futures, and every tennis player is better at 22 than they are at 18. Even the greats; Carlos is going to be better at 22 than he was at 18. So why not try then? That was the path they encouraged us towards, but I have zero memory of any pushing.

Dan Kiernan (22:42)

But the value of knowledge, right? All of you boys have always come across to me as incredibly level-headed. And having that knowledge behind you, parents who understand the sport, who've got the bigger picture and have gone through that journey multiple times, goes a long, long way.

In terms of when you finished college, did you then try and play on the pro tour? Did you go straight to coaching? How did that look?

Tom Corrie (23:18)

I went straight to coaching. I wasn't 100% sure what I was going to do. I almost got a job with, I'm sure, one of your friends, Aidan Graveson, at Babolat. I remember getting down to a last interview. For a while I thought I wanted to get into tennis sales and marketing; I'd had my first internship in sales. I almost...

Dan Kiernan (23:30)

We need some balls, by the way, if you could get them sent out.

Tom Corrie (23:44)

I almost got a job there, and meanwhile I met Matt Wilcox and started to hit. They used to pay me, because at 22, like I said, I was better than most 15-year-olds or whatever, so I was paid to hit with good players there. I didn't really think I was going to be a coach, but then I basically fell in love with it.

I didn't do that Babolat job. I started to hit more and more and coach more and more. Like lots of young coaches, you get feedback from players: they liked having you around, and you could see them getting better at small things you were saying. And I was like, oh, this is bloody good.

I love tennis. I loved coaching at that stage. I loved travelling. I loved competing. I'm competitive; we're all competitive. So if you're not going to compete yourself, watching someone else do it who's listening to you, as you now do it, from Arthur Ashe's box, is as close to competing as you can get.

So I basically loved everything about it, and I was down that path. And I was very lucky that Matt was setting up one of the lead academies in the UK at the time. We were all young coaches, it was a great environment, and we were all learning loads. So I just went full throttle into coaching, basically.

Dan Kiernan (25:01)

From the outside at that time, you guys seemed like a real powerhouse as a coaching team. I think Matt's fantastic. He's clearly a well thought out, organised, ambitious young man, or not so young anymore. It felt like that was a real place to be.

What made that environment what it was? Because there were lots of players coming through it, and lots of players being attracted to it. If you look back now, what were two or three almost non-negotiable things, things you did really, really well, that enabled the success of the place?

Tom Corrie (25:49)

It sounds cliché, but genuinely the environment was all based around improving, and not just players but coaches. I started full time shortly after college; I finished in 2008, hung around for a year, went back to the States, had a great time for a while, and then decided I wanted to be back in England, in 2009, 2010.

The group of coaches were all young. Richard Hawkes, who is now actually the managing director of TennisViz, was working there. A great coach, one of the best coaches I've ever worked with. Jamie Evans, a very successful British coach, was there. Shortly after that, Tom Greenland joined for a while, another very successful British coach. Ben Roberts Law is still there; he's a good level-five coach.

But none of us were established. People would point fingers at us and say, you don't have someone that's been there and done that. There was no head coach figure. Matt was the tennis director, and then we were all leaders in little areas, but all just striving to be better.

Dan Kiernan (26:47)

Is that the secret?

Tom Corrie (27:08)

It was at a time when Louis Cayer was fairly early on in his LTA coach education goals. He would come in and destroy us, and basically, I'm sure you've been there, tell us how far off the level we were to be truly international coaches.

But we all went, yeah, good, we don't know what high international-level coaching actually is. So come back again and we'll be 1% better. And come back again, Louis, and you're still going to destroy us, and it's going to hurt for an hour afterwards, because you pride yourself on your coaching and he basically tells you how bad you are.

But we were all quite thirsty: that's okay, we'll just keep getting better. So that was really the key. And my main reflection on Gosling, and then we can move on, is that we did produce some decent players. There was a period, which we can come to, when Salisbury came to us and I was coaching Ed, later down the road, where we had a group of professional players getting some good success.

That was successful for a while. We weren't producing as many players as some people would like, but we definitely produced a lot of good coaches. Jamie Evans is still one of the RPDC LTA coaches now. Tom Greenland is one of them. I was one, before I took this role; I worked for the LTA after that.

Matt's had some success in different things, and the coaches there are still very good. We grew a lot of really good, capable coaches out of that environment, and some good players.

Dan Kiernan (28:35)

I'm going to jump ahead a little bit, because I do want to ask you a bit more about your coaching. A coach like yourself: why have you now moved into a different part of the sport? What's the link there? What's the reason?

Tom Corrie (28:51)

For me, I was coaching at Gosling until the end of 2018. Ed, my younger brother, who I travelled with for seven years and who, as you said, got to around 200, stopped in 2018. I was also coaching Salisbury, who had transitioned to doubles a year or two earlier.

Whilst I was coaching him, we did some cool things. Not what he's done since, so I'm not taking credit for that. But he got to the semis of Wimbledon during that period, which for me as a coach was pretty cool. As you've experienced, you're like, well, this is pretty special, being in the players' lounge on semi-final day and all that.

Then I got offered a job with the LTA as a regional coach down here in the South West; I'm now based in Bath. And I basically had a decision to make. I had a little kid, and we wanted to have another kid. Travelling with the players, as you know, if you do it properly, is 30, 35 weeks a year. Some of the top guys are doing 40.

I basically made the choice to spend more time with my children and do the LTA role, while still travelling 10, 15 weeks a year, but not 35, 40. That was the hardest decision I'd made in my life to that point. Touch wood, I'd never had any hard decisions. Go to college? Yep. Meet my wife, I like her? Yep. Meet Matt Wilcox, I like that? Yep.

That was a hard decision, because I still really like Joe to this day. We get along really well. And I could see that he could be the number one doubles player in the world, and he's gone and achieved that. So I thought, am I going to walk away from that? That was bold. But I made that decision, and it was very difficult.

I was then coaching for the LTA, and then I coached at Bath for a bit, back on the court and off the LTA job. I loved it. We lived 15 minutes from the University of Bath, and I was going to stay there for the next 10 years, easy. The only reason I stopped was this opportunity.

And making this decision became the new hardest decision of my life, because I phoned a lot of people in British tennis going, am I really going to walk off the court? In 2021, which is when I started with TennisViz, I was the best coach I'd ever been. I was better than when I was coaching Ed. I was better than when I was coaching Joe.

I was working with 14s in the LTA role, and I had experience at the top of the game that could help them. I'm not saying I was by any means an amazing coach, but I felt very comfortable and confident in my coaching, and I would still seek out Louis and different people to tell me what I could do better.

But the only reason I stopped was this opportunity. I didn't feel burnt out. I'm pretty fit physically; I still keep myself pretty fit. I like travel. I didn't want to travel 35 weeks a year, as I said, but I like travelling 10, and I could have done that forever. And this opportunity is going really well and I'm really enjoying it.

The only reason I took it was that I didn't know anything about that world. I knew tennis data already, because, and we can come to that if we have time, I love stats. I always have. But I didn't know anything about the broadcast environment, the media environment, the environment of building websites, which we now do.

So it was an exciting opportunity to feel like I was learning at a very steep curve again. Whereas in coaching, I still felt like I was improving, but not like every day there was something new. So that's actually what attracted me, not burnout, so to speak.

Dan Kiernan (32:42)

And that's maybe why you've been able to make clear decisions as well, right? Making them on your own terms. They're hard decisions, but it was the same when I moved to Spain. I was really happy in my job. I loved what I did. I loved working at Edgbaston Priory. I loved working with all the players.

When we're in a position where we're happy with what we're doing, but get the opportunity to explore something that might be a little bit better for various reasons, that's a really privileged position to be in. And it seems like you've managed your life very well to give yourself the options.

But the question that comes into my head is: you didn't have experience in these things. Why the hell were they offering you the job?

Tom Corrie (33:33)

Well, I didn't have experience in some of the things. I might have sort of done it a little bit there. But I did have experience in tennis. I did have experience in tennis data, to a point, because Richard, who started the company, and I had for years been manually tagging matches and analysing data, in a way less sophisticated way than we now do.

I had experience in the British tennis network. I didn't have experience in the broadcast environment, but because of our backgrounds I'm friends with Nick Lester, Arvind Parmar, some of the guys who are commentating.

And Richard was looking for someone else who understood tennis. When we get into it, and transition to TennisViz, what we ultimately do is analyse tennis matches and analyse tennis data. I do have good experience in that from a coaching standpoint.

There are other performance analysis people in our team, and data scientists, and all these engineers who can do the things I didn't have experience in. But Richard needed, at that stage, someone else who could watch a tennis match and help develop the technology to produce what you would want as a tennis coach. And I knew, not perfectly, but to a decent degree, what you would want, because I'd had very similar experiences to you.

Dan Kiernan (35:06)

Yeah. So tell me the story of TennisViz. Is it what Richard set out for it to be? When he first started the company, with the vision and mission he had, is that what you guys are living, or has it transitioned and moved into different areas?

Tom Corrie (35:37)

I think it really is what he set out to do. He'd been doing it whilst he was still coaching, at the very beginning, and then he's been full time with TennisViz and Ellipse Data, our parent company, for probably seven years now. I'm over four years. Back then, he had a vision, which he'd made with somebody else, to create more engaging tennis data.

When I first watched him do presentations, and I've done endless presentations now, his opening line was that the year he was born, and he's a few years older than me, Boris Becker was in the final of Wimbledon. And the stats appearing on the TV screen are the same as on the day his dad was watching Boris Becker win Wimbledon.

We're all sports fans as well. If you watch any other sport, the data has not stood still for the last 42 years. It's all moved on, and nowadays in all sports it is more engaging. Some of it will go over certain people's heads, and we're not saying that everything is right for everybody. But it's all moved on and hasn't stood still.

And yet we're proudly going, here are his break points won and first serve percentage, and that's all the data we can bring to the masses. And we're like, no, no, there's way more than that to tennis.

Sometimes, of course, when you finish a match you're going, what was my first serve percentage? What were my first serve points won? Of course there's a place for that. But that's not the only thing you're looking at.

What if we could give you doubles data or singles data that could show you a step deeper on some of the things you're acknowledging in your head? Sometimes you have the numbers for them, but sometimes you just have the feel. If your feel is now backed up with data, isn't that more powerful, for performance and for the fans at home?

So I do think it's pretty much gone in the direction he wanted it to go. Sometimes with business decisions, you can't control them; you take the opportunities you can get. But the overall vision of the company has moved where he wanted it to.

Dan Kiernan (37:57)

And is the target market players, coaches, audiences? What's the target market for the data that's produced?

Tom Corrie (38:08)

All of the above. There's performance, where I lead a small team creating data for coaches and players. One of our lead contracts is ATP Tennis IQ, through our partnership with Tennis Data Innovations, TDI. We have a very close working relationship with them; it's a company set up between the ATP Tour and ATP Media to manage their data rights.

ATP Tennis IQ is a full analytics platform for the players and coaches, with all ranges of data and automated video tagging. We can show it; people may have seen it on the Gil podcast, I always bring that kind of stuff up. So we do that side of the business.

And then we also create data that's very fan friendly, like our shot quality score, which is a zero to 10 rating of a serve, return, forehand and backhand, using all the ball and player tracking data. All of this is real data science.

The ball and player tracking data has commonly been thought of as Hawk-Eye data, but there are more companies now. We take all of their data. That's the stuff you've seen on TV: the ball placements, the shot speeds, the spin rates.

We put all that together and we've developed algorithms to essentially answer those pub chats, like, who's got the better forehand, Sinner or Alcaraz? And that's obviously a dangerous debate to be getting into.

But we all had that chat. Louis Cayer would rate our rhythm, timing and momentum when we did all the courses; that's coach chat for different things Louis would rate. We'd all sit there and go, seven out of 10, eight out of 10. Me and Richard loved all that. That was all very process-driven tennis coaching.

And we thought, well, fans would like that as well, if there was a way to create it properly. Not out of thin air, or "Tom Corrie thinks it's an 8.5" or something like that, because that gets boring. But real stuff that you can then measure improvement on as well.

Because the other thing with our metrics, when it comes to players and coaches, is that they don't care so much that you've got an 8.2 average and I've got an 8.1. What you care about is: it's an 8.2 now, what is it in three months' time? What is it on clay? What is it on hard? How does it fluctuate in the wind? Are you better indoors or outdoors? Real coaching stuff.

We give them all the measures and all the player averages, and they can split them on our platforms by surface or by any run of tournaments. So with Vacherot, I can tell you what his forehand quality and his backhand quality were in Shanghai compared to his other ATP matches. Rinderknech's were way up.

What was he then doing differently? Was he making more balls? Was he hitting it harder? Was he hitting it closer to the lines? Was he doing all of those things? And then you get into the coaching, which is the bit I also love. What process was he doing differently to produce those performance and outcome goals? Only the coaches really know.

Maybe the coach was talking to him about something as simple as timing his split step and adjusting his feet to the ball, or creating more space on the forehand because he usually gets too close to it. Or maybe it was all about the mental side, all about getting ready the day before.

Whatever process it was, it has now factually improved a performance. In this case it's a great fairy tale story; they've won a tournament they never dreamed they would win.

But often as coaches, our challenge was, well, we think they're playing better, but they haven't won yet. So you always fuel them with, we know you're playing better, stay focused on the process, keep believing in this, the results will come. We can't say when, but they'll come.

Whereas now, with the platform, you can say, no, you're definitely playing better, I can show you that you are definitely playing better, and if you stay with this, the results will come. So I've rambled a little bit there.

Dan Kiernan (42:03)

No, no, no, you haven't. You've got me fully engaged. I'm a big data guy. I'd go as far as saying that coaches who say data is nonsense, that they don't need it and their eye is good enough, it's time to move on, guys, if you're in that position. And I've had people on the podcast who have said it.

I've said for years and years that we are so far behind as a sport. Unbelievably far behind. How can we not want to be informed accurately? Why would we not want that?

I've now been part of major titles, including the WTA Finals, three titles, multiple finals. And I honestly believe that, sorry girls, they haven't necessarily been the best tennis players on the court. But I do believe they've been the best-informed tennis players going into some really big matches, and that has made some massive, massive differences.

And that's from data, from having someone who's working and feeding me something that I would know. And I guess the other thing, I'm using that word burnout again, and the reason my mind's on it is that I'm doing a presentation on this in a couple of weeks.

As I'm bringing the presentation together, one of my big things with coaches is having renewed information and content to work on with players. I think it's so invigorating.

You're doing your drills and your things, but if you know that in this situation this is happening, and you're not winning a high enough percentage of points, then you're going to drill to try and win an extra 5 or 10% of points by improving the quality in this area.

Then I can't wait to get on court every day. I'm running to the courts. If I don't have that strong purpose and understanding in my mind, it's a bit monotonous and a bit mundane.

And if we're being honest, and any coaches listening can challenge me on this, there's a high percentage of coaches who get the basket out and go, oh, who have I got today? It doesn't have that real purpose.

Tom Corrie (44:53)

When I was doing my time at the LTA, I was working with some of the best coaches in the country, who I still very much respect. Some of them, and other coaches from around the country, would be at events and would say phrases like, she just needs to make a few more of those, or he just needs to do that a few more times.

They would say it to the parents, and the parents would lap it up. And I was there going, what the F is a few more? To me, that is not good enough. Even when I was coaching them, I'd chart the matches. This is what the best kid in the country does. This is what you're doing. So this is "a few more", because there's a gap here that can be measured.

That was part of the reason I got into this. When Richard started explaining to me the opportunities with ball and player tracking, and that we can train technology to make standard decisions about what all the benchmarks and all the definitions are, to your point, I was like, wow, now we're talking.

Because now we can plot exactly what "a few more" is at the top of the game. And as technology improves and expands, it will trickle down to everywhere in the game.

It's happening now; in two, three years' time, and I say 10 because I think by then it would be pretty standard, coaches at Bath and all the other academies will have access to the same technology and the same analysis that Sinner and Alcaraz and Vacherot and everybody have access to now.

It'll have the same set of definitions, tweaked slightly for different ages and stages. The technology is tweaked for males and females because of some of the physical differences and the different norms in the game. An average first serve speed for males and females is different.

So if you're hitting benchmarks on a female serve that put you in the upper 5% on tour, that wouldn't be the same upper 5% on the men's tour. That is tweaked, but the underlying models are the same. So, understanding what I've just said, you can even compare across genders, and across age groups and everything else. Everything is standardised.

The main reason for that is technology. It's not your call, your analyst's call, the LTA analyst's call or my call. It's not anyone's call. We've trained the technology, getting great feedback from top coaches.

Now, if you compare Vacherot to Sinner to Mpetshi Perricard to Draper to players coming through Challengers, as TDI begin to roll out the tracking at Challengers, it's all the same.

When I was coaching Ed, I would have absolutely loved this whenever he got into a Challenger, so I could say factually, this is your ball speed in defence, offence and neutral. This is the reps that Carlos has got on his forehand.

We know biomechanically, and Ed might listen, his forehand was nowhere near as good as Carlos's. His backhand return was bloody good, but his forehand with no pace, he always struggled with.

But at least if we knew more about what the facts were, and what the facts were on average for a player ranked 150, and then 100, and then 50, and then 25, and then the top 10, then we could chase towards that.

Tennis IQ is the ATP performance platform. We've also had contracts with Wimbledon and Roland Garros to put some of the data on broadcast screens. So you'll have seen some of the data come out, and Henman and loads of other very successful pundits talk about it and understand it.

That's high-level, chunked-up, fan-engaging stuff, not performance analysis. One of our metrics is steal score. It's the percentage of points you win once you've been in defence in a point, and then win it. That might be an amazing passing shot winner, but it might be that you just dig three balls in in defence and then they miss a short forehand. That's still a steal in our model.

Dan Kiernan (48:44)

So how do you define a steal?

Tom Corrie (49:07)

To define if someone's in defence, it's based on the quality of the ball they receive. So we developed the shot quality measure. I can show videos another time, but for your listeners: the shot quality measure is the zero to 10, which is based on the speed, spin, depth and width, has a bit about the bounce angle in it, and the impact it has on the opponent.

As a good coach, you'll understand that a ball that lands fast, close to the line, is in general obviously better than a slow ball that lands in the middle of the court. So that fast ball close to the line will get a higher score.

Dan Kiernan (49:40)

Unless it goes to Ed's forehand. Sorry, Ed.

Tom Corrie (50:00)

Yeah, that's where they ended up. We joked about that the other day, actually. He asked me a question about timing, and he literally said to me, what was it, a backhand return or a slow forehand? A slow forehand in the wind, jeepers, that gives us nightmares.

Where were we? The shot quality of the ball. When you're deciding whether the person's in attack, neutral or defence, the first thing we consider is the quality of the incoming shot. Where we always felt some of the broadcast graphics were lacking is that they'd put those graphics up and say, this person's playing really aggressively, look how many balls he's hit inside the baseline. Or, that person's playing passively, he's playing behind the baseline.

You're like, come on. I know why they're doing it, because it does help someone with a very basic tennis understanding, someone watching Wimbledon who's never watched tennis before. It's loosely true.

But I always say to people, if I come to the net against Rafa and he zips one down at my toes, I am defending a hundred times out of a hundred. So it doesn't matter that I'm at the net. I could rush, I could play balls on the half volley inside the baseline, but I'd lose love and love, because it's a nonsense tactic. The quality of the ball you receive is fundamental.

Then it does take into account court positioning. It considers how far back you are, because that is a factor. It takes into account the left and right court positioning and your recovery position. Because if I'm playing you and I have you dragged out wide, and then I have a good position on the next shot, then clearly I have an advantage in the point, because I've got a massive space.

So the algorithm takes all those things together. It also takes into account the person's contact point, because we get that from the tracking data. Is it a little bit too early? Is it late? Am I playing on the stretch or not? We have a standard distance for what on the stretch is, for male and female players, based on the centre of mass of the human and the contact point.

It puts all those things together and then says, for any shot, whether you're in defence, neutral or attack. And if we watched it together, we would agree on nine out of 10 of those points.

Yeah, that's defence, because he's picking a half volley off his toes. That's defence, because he's on the stretch. That's neutral; no one's got the advantage. That's attack: big ball, I'm up, you're a bit out of position, good contact point.

We would agree on nine out of 10, or eight out of 10. There might be two we wouldn't agree on, but the technology will be consistent. So even if we don't agree on those two, and I say that's neutral and you say, no, it's attack, he's a little bit out like that, it doesn't actually matter, because the technology is always consistent.

And then a steal, looping back... I've really gone off on a rant there. A steal is when all those signals are hit and the player is deemed to be in defence. It could be that I'm on the baseline in the middle of the court, but you fired one at my toes. That will go down as defence.

I pop it back in, you miss the next shot: steal. It could be that I've scrambled four balls side to side, the most obvious steal in the history of tennis, and I hit a passing shot, the one in 100, round the side fence, like Alcaraz. That's a steal.

It could be that I approach the net, you hit an amazing pass, I lunge on the volley, dig the ball over, semi-shank it, and it dribbles over the net. That's a steal. The tech is on all of those things.

A large part of that had already begun development; it wasn't ready when I started. When I saw the first signs of it, I was like, holy smokes, Rich, how have you done that? That was with one of the engineers. Then I added some fine tuning, and we've continued to fine tune it for years.

And I was like, this is now game changing. Because you can derive a phase of play, as we call it, attack, neutral or defence, and you can derive the shot quality measure, and you can derive whether players are at the baseline or at the net consistently. So it's not just two metres inside the baseline.

I'm not going to get into all the definitions on here, because that's literally what we do and it takes weeks. But it's consistent, and it's very good. We also have a very detailed breakdown of shot type. Our technology can tell whether it's a forehand topspin lob or a backhand topspin lob, a short slice versus a deep slice, versus a drop shot, versus an angle. All of those have different definitions.

Whether you're returning from neutral, up, back, forehand, topspin, chip, all of those have different definitions. So everything has been broken down to that level of degree, because once you do that, you can chunk it back up to make it simple for people.

So everything I've just described is almost a distraction unless you want to get into the weeds. What the players are doing, because it's on their platform and they see it on TV, is taking it largely at face value. A lot of them don't really want to get into the weeds of everything I've just described, but it matches their feel.

So if someone plays a match and the coach thinks they've played passively, they go onto our platform. One of the things there is the in-attack percentage: the percentage of shots where you've been in attack, the percentage in neutral, the percentage when you've been under attack.

When they go on there and see, yeah, that was lower than my average and his was really high, then we've got them, because they're like, yeah, I felt passive. What's tour average? 24% of shots in attack is tour average. I was down at 17.

Well, if you're an aggressive player, that's low. If you're Alex de Minaur, it's not low, it's about his average. But if you're a big server who plays a lot on the front foot, that's very low. That's not good enough for your game style, so you need to do something about it.

But if you're Alex de Minaur, you can be below the average for shots in attack, but then you have to have a bloody high steal score, which he does, hence why he's at the top. So yeah, I've really gone off on one there.

Dan Kiernan (55:40)

No, no, you haven't. I'm completely with you. Just to share a very quick story: I was in Adelaide last year, 2024, with James Trotman, who I'm good friends with. He's Jack Draper's coach, and I know Jamie Delgado has joined the team now as well. He was actually the first person who brought what you guys do to my attention.

He was talking to me about it, and then he signposted me to your Instagram page. He quoted a couple of things Jack had done that day, gave these ratings, and maybe talked about his opponent. And I was like, that sounds good, but what are those numbers? He was like, yeah, he had a 9.14, and I was like, awesome, mate, what is that? Sounds like an earthquake. What the hell?

But yeah, that was quite nice. Personally, I'd love to pull up the screen, but I'm looking at the time and we don't have it right now. I would absolutely love you to promise to come back and do that, and we can do some of the more YouTube-appropriate stuff.

But I'd like to have a pub chat with you. Imagine we've met in the pub and we haven't drunk too many beers yet, so we're keeping it professional, but we're having that pub chat.

A few things I'm curious about. Rally length has been a big discussion over the years. Is rally length changing? Is it going up? We've been quoted very low numbers on rally length, which I think gave everyone a big shock maybe 10 years ago. Where are we at with that?

Tom Corrie (57:26)

Incrementally, and it depends on surface and environment. Obviously the stuff you already know is surface specific: clay will have a fractionally larger rally length than hard, as will the grass environment, and levels of humidity, which slow the ball down, will increase it slightly.

I'd need to be brutally honest: I would need to get into the weeds with one of the data scientists to answer that properly. I know that it's fractionally changing, with the average rally length on tour at 3.3, and at certain events 3.5, but I can't tell you off the top of my head which events are doing what, or whether there's enough in the court speed for that. But when you're watching, it's always player dependent, right?

Dan Kiernan (58:16)

Absolutely. Ball speeds.

Tom Corrie (58:23)

Ball speeds are getting fractionally faster, yes. In rally situations, people are hitting it bigger, as we know, because of technology and the way they trust it and develop their game. Obviously tech has led that revolution, and I don't mean our tech; I mean string quality, et cetera. But it's the biomechanics that's actually making the difference.

Younger players are now able to swing freer, from further from the ball, because they grew up trusting the technology. It's the evolution of the physicality, and the level of muscle relaxation.

I remember, and you'll remember, when I first saw Shapovalov and Felix Auger Aliassime at a Futures in Canada, when I was travelling with Ed and they were 15, 16 years old. I think Felix was, at the time, the youngest player to qualify for a Challenger, in Drummondville, and he was like 15; obviously he looked older.

But the level of muscle relaxation, particularly when he struck the ball, you were like, sorry, what's that? The noise it made off the racket. Shapo is still loose whenever you see him, but there's more and more of it now. Obviously Sinner and Alcaraz, and down the list as players come through. It's like, well, it's standard now.

If you don't have that level of muscle relaxation, you'd better be insanely good at something else, because everyone's doing it.

And Andy's famously talked about this: when I play them, I have no time. Even when I was playing Novak and those guys back then, I'd feel like I had a bit of time if I got the ball there. Whereas against these guys, there's no time anywhere; they're just swinging on everything.

So I've gone into coaching stuff, but that is influencing the ball speed a little bit.

Dan Kiernan (1:00:13)

So this is maybe a little bit less of a pub chat, but I do want to get into a couple of Alcaraz–Sinner things, because it's a topic right now, right? It would be nice to jump into. But again, I had a guy, Chris Lewit , on the podcast a few months ago. He's someone who's really looked into Spanish tennis.

I've always had these theories on Spanish tennis, over 15 years of working here and having a home here and an academy here that I love. I love 95% of what Spanish tennis stands for. But I always had this little 5% where I thought, I wonder if they're going to get caught out on that.

In very general terms, the Spanish system has been built around the serve almost just starting the point, and looking to play quite tactically, very much using the forehand to get high up onto the backhand, and lots of basic patterns around that.

So I guess my question to you is: do you think the game's getting a little less tactical and more about physicality and ball strike, moving incredibly well and striking the ball? Or is that just another one of my fluffy tennis coach theories?

Tom Corrie (1:01:31)

I'm trying to think how to answer without just going fluffy, and bring it back to some of the metrics, as a better way of answering it. Take the Spanish players; while you were talking, I was just whipping them up. We've got Alcaraz at one, Davidovich Fokina at 20 in the world, this is this week, whenever it goes out, Munar at 42, Bautista Agut at 57, Martínez at 89.

So I'm going to sort of answer the question in two ways. None of those guys, I'm scanning down now... let me find Carlos. To find something that's going to make him seem more human, which people don't like: Carlos is 67th in the serve quality leaderboard. That's the combination of speed, spin, and how close to the lines.

Dan Kiernan (1:02:20)

Has that got better this year?

Tom Corrie (1:02:22)

Marginally. What has got better, and we can talk about all that ATP tour data as much as we want, is serve effectiveness, which is a slightly different measure. Serve quality measures the speed, spin and accuracy of the serve, and it contains a small element of what it does to the opponent.

Serve effectiveness, which is another measure we've built, and one you would have done in your coaching and I could do manually, is how often my serve creates an ace or an unreturned serve, if it's a first serve, or an attacking position on my next ball. So how often does it give me an advantage in the point?

He has seen an increase in that. His serve quality's improved marginally, which brings him up the ranking a bit, but his serve effectiveness at different points this year is up nearly 10%. So is he serving smarter, is the question. Is he picking the opponent's weakness at the right time to get more unreturned serves and shorter balls? The data suggests yes.

But where I was going with it is, he's 67th, and I'm going to have to keep scrolling down to find the other Spanish players, because the serve quality is low.

Dan Kiernan (1:03:27)

Yeah, there you go. So that definitely backs up one of my arguments.

Tom Corrie (1:03:35)

Yeah. And the second thing I was going to say about the game is that one of our metrics is called conversion score. It's the opposite of steal. It's when you're in attack in a point, what percentage of points do you go on and win; how clinical are you being.

I was thinking about who's been the best at that in recent years. Novak, not in the last two years, but before that, when we started producing the metric. We were watching the outputs come out, and it was like poetry to a certain degree.

We watch Novak with our eyes and think, he doesn't stuff up short balls. He's not the most natural volleyer of all time, but he's very efficient around the net. And it's more about: I have those short forehands, I have balls where I'm slightly in attack in the point. Do I put it in the space and have a very low error rate on that? Do I then finish on the next ball? He's been the king of that in recent years.

Now, Sinner is near the top every year. Alcaraz is near the top every year. The top players are near the top of that every year, whereas Mpetshi...

Dan Kiernan (1:04:41)

What about Zverev? It was actually Calvin Betton who said it on one of our Grand Slam podcasts, and I tend to agree with most things Calvin says, apart from when he starts talking about football. Calvin doesn't hold back on his theories, and one of them is that Zverev will never, ever win a Grand Slam, because his conversion rate on the forehand side just isn't good enough. He doesn't put the ball away on the forehand side.

Tom Corrie (1:05:12)

Across the board, when we chunk up the conversion score, we don't break it down by serve, return, forehand and volleys, because net points won is very close to being a volley version. But across the board, I'm looking at it now. For the last 52 weeks, he was 12th for conversion score.

When you're chunking data up... I had a chat with Calvin once about Zverev's forehand last year. This year, his forehand's actually dropped in terms of quality and position. And his conversion score, yeah, it's gone down quite a bit, actually. Let's find him there.

Dan Kiernan (1:05:51)

Maybe Calvin said it and he's lost his confidence.

Tom Corrie (1:05:54)

He's 26th on tour this year for conversion score, and his number is 69%, which is bang on tour average. Considering that he is, whatever his ranking is this week, three, and he's been higher than five, that's actually quite low.

With Calvin, when you chunk data up... he saw me at Turin last year, when I was showing the coaches how to use the platform, and he said, how is Zverev's forehand so high? And I said, how many of his matches do you watch?

I can tell you that this year, just on the ATP tour, so not even slams, he's played 50 matches; we've got a database of this. How many of those 50 have you watched? Two. Who were they against? Yes, Sinner and Alcaraz. He didn't actually say two to me; he might have watched 10.

But you're watching him play Sinner and Alcaraz, when his forehand, we all agree, at those moments when he gets yippy, drops. He'll tell you it does, so this isn't slagging him off. Have you watched him when he wins those 250s and 500s, cleaning people up six-two, six-three, which he's done regularly in the last few years? No.

So his forehand average, if you take a season average, doesn't care about against Alcaraz or against Sinner at four-all in the third set. It cares about every forehand he's hit.

Dan Kiernan (1:07:19)

But then as a coach, his coach, you're going, okay, our issue is here. So how do you overcome that? And that's the beauty of all of this, right? That's the thing I love about it, and the thing I would love to get into the weeds on. As coaches, we need to know the weeds, but the art in what we do is how that's then delivered to the player.

It's actually one of the things I love about coaching doubles players, because it's completely different. Before a Grand Slam final, how I talk to my team will be completely different between the two players. With one of them, it'll be pretty deep analysis, sending videos, having big conversations. It's not that the other one's not watching the videos, but they're doing it in their own way, the way they take the information.

That's what I love about coaching. Having accessibility to all of this, having the understanding of all of this, interpreting it in the way you think can impact your player, and then actually finding the right way to deliver it, at the right moments, with the right tone. I find it fascinating.

I want to ask a couple more bits, and I apologise to my kids, who I'm supposed to be on court with in two minutes, but this is going to make up for it when you listen to this, because it's great information from Tom.

I'm going to go into Sinner and Alcaraz. I've been guilty of saying what I think is quite a common thing, and I heard you saying it as well, so I'm taking you down with me. You said it on Gil, in your conversation with Gil on YouTube, which was excellent: that Alcaraz lacks consistency.

Sinner's the consistent guy; Sinner turns up, Sinner's always there. Where's Alcaraz? Alcaraz can lose early to anybody. And not that he's listened to me, but I think he's listened to experts on the TV as well, because it feels like this year he's had the bit between his teeth, almost going, you know what, guys, you're telling me I'm inconsistent?

Well, how about this? I'm 66 and six on the year. How's that for consistency, guys? Is that all right for you? I'm 2,500 points ahead of Jannik Sinner and then a further 4,000 points ahead of number three in the world. Are you happy with my world number one this year, winning all of these matches?

So what does the data tell us about Carlos Alcaraz and the idea that he needs to be more consistent?

Tom Corrie (1:09:57)

Well, there are two things at play there, aren't there? In the last two, three years, he's had a few stinky results here and there, but in general his results have been very consistent. But when I talk about consistency, I'm privy to the numbers on a live feed at every match he plays, through different contracts and different things.

And I'm an addict to this stuff now. I don't do much Instagram apart from Tennis Insights, check it out. My dopamine comes from watching tennis numbers tick over in real time.

Anyway, because I'm into that: his performances fluctuate more on something as simple as the forehand shot quality number, which again is the speed, spin, depth and width, and the impact that has on his opponent. And consistency is very much in there, because if you hit the ball out of the court, you get a zero in our model.

People say, well, yeah, but what about when he's defending, those amazing shots? It's also smart, so it's bang on with that. It knows that if you're in defence or extreme defence and you hit an amazing shot, you'll get way more of a boost than if you're in attack and just put a forehand away.

And if you miss from extreme defence, you get a very minute negative effect. Whereas if you miss a forehand sitter that everyone's expecting you to make, where the probability is that you'll make it, you get more of a negative. So it does all that smart stuff.

His numbers will fluctuate more across the season than Jannik's, because there are matches we can all remember where it's like, ooh, he's a bit off for a set. That doesn't mean he loses the match.

This year, he can be off for a set, spray his forehand everywhere, hit drop shots at the wrong time, overpress and do some things, and he can lose that set, but then he still wins the other two sets, so he still wins.

But that does affect his overall season ranking, because he does that enough that he ends up with a lower forehand quality than Sinner, who basically doesn't do that. He basically does the same every day.

But all of that said, I've just put the last few months into my platform while you were talking, and his forehand quality for the events... I'm going to read out Tokyo, Cincinnati, Queen's, going back as far as Rome. So it's actually the last six months.

If he averaged that for the next six months, it'd be the number one forehand quality of all players. He's already about three, but he'd go above Sinner, because he's been that much more consistent in the last six months.

And you heard me do the thing on the pod where you put those two players' scores side by side. It does match the perception: Sinner's slightly higher in our metrics for the last 52 weeks. But then when you put up their head-to-head scores, when they play each other, most of them tilt in Carlos's favour, because he lifts his level against Jannik.

Jannik has moments, like the Wimbledon final, where he lifts his level against Carlos. But in general, across ATP tour matches, his level has actually gone down slightly in a couple of key areas, and Carlos's has gone up.

Dan Kiernan (1:13:13)

So in layman's terms, you've got those data points: one of them is Alcaraz's numbers, one of them is Sinner's numbers in the head-to-head. This is the great rivalry we're after, right? There is an argument to say it's not a rivalry, because Alcaraz has kind of taken him to the cleaners.

If you're looking at those from a purely objective measure, what are Sinner's numbers saying he's not doing well enough against Alcaraz? Or what is Alcaraz doing well against Sinner that's stopping Sinner from doing it as well?

Tom Corrie (1:13:52)

Yeah, there's one key one, which you've probably heard me say: conversion score, the points won when you're in attack, how clinical you're being. Sinner, over the last two years, has obviously been one of the tour leaders in that. When he plays Alcaraz in ATP matches, it's down to 61%, a drop from his tour-leading number of 73%. So that's a 12% difference in how many points you go on and convert when you're in attack.

And fans will say it's a combination of things with Carlos, and all of that is true: his variation, his court coverage, the mental edge, his speed around the court, his aura, the history of Sinner losing that French Open final from a winning position.

And Sinner, not this year, the year before, in, was it Beijing or Tokyo? The fans will be on me there. I'd have to check, but I'm pretty sure it was Beijing. Sinner was up in the third-set tiebreak, and Alcaraz won that one 7-6 in the third.

If you go back and watch that tiebreak, it is purely berserk what happens in the last four points, where Carlos is just all over the map, making balls and coming up with winners. All those things together mean that Carlos is finding a way to steal points against Jannik Sinner that he shouldn't. Points that no one else wins against Jannik Sinner.

Dan Kiernan (1:15:20)

Who's next? You alluded to this earlier: maybe the numbers can tell us. And I know the numbers don't mean winning points, right? It's just about quality. And if you bring quality for long enough, then the byproduct is that you start to win more. At least that's what I try and tell my guys; it's one of my big philosophies, so I hope it's true.

It's been the last eight Grand Slam finals now. We're just talking about the men, guys, by the way, because this data isn't available on the WTA side, just to get that out there before I get angry people coming at me. That's something we can talk about next time we have you on.

In terms of the next player, even if you look at it from a points perspective, Sinner has almost double the points of the number three, and then Alcaraz has another two and a half thousand on top of that. So we're talking almost to the point of boredom, in some ways, if we're not careful here; these guys are dominating. Who's next, based on the numbers you're seeing? Is anybody getting close?

Tom Corrie (1:16:33)

Well, and I get accused of bias here, but Jack Draper is number one for return quality in 2025 so far. And a big part of return quality is balls made, because if you don't make returns, you don't get scores.

Dan Kiernan (1:16:44)

Wow. Yeah, I know he's worked hard on that. I won't go into the details for obvious reasons, but I do know he's done a lot of work on that part of his game.

Tom Corrie (1:17:02)

And he obviously hasn't had the chance to increase or decrease it, because if you put in a few rounds of bad matches, it goes down. But he's number one for return quality, among all of his shot qualities and the other metrics.

Then, without shot quality, there are other metrics moving in the right direction. Fonseca has the power. It's obvious if you're an experienced coach: the muscle relaxation, the timing, the rhythm and momentum on that forehand are as good as they can be.

The landing in the court is not yet as good as it can be. So his shot quality is average at the moment, but that's not because the forehand doesn't have the capability to be one of the best in the world. It's because he misses the court more. And you used to see this with Carlos.

Three years ago, I was getting frustrated with Carlos's forehand shot quality, because I was like, no, no, this is one of the best forehands, and I've got to go on a podcast and tell people why it's 50th, and they're all going to say, your model's wrong. And I'm going, no, no, it's not. You need to watch really closely. You need to watch him miss those forehands, because it's really pissing me off.

Dan Kiernan (1:17:52)

And you've got Juan Carlos in the corner, literally with his hand on his head, going, what? No, calm, no.

Tom Corrie (1:18:23)

But luckily, history shows he sorted that out. He lands them all now. He's top three or four for forehand quality every year, and could be number one if he lands a few more. Anyway, with Fonseca, and this is just a Tom Corrie belief, I believe that forehand quality will continue to rise as he lands more, and that will push him up.

Then in terms of other people, Arthur Fils's forehand quality has improved a lot. It's a similar story: he always had the revs, always had the power. It's a beautiful-looking forehand in terms of muscle relaxation and rotation and how he lines up for it. But he missed the court a lot. He's stopped missing, and that's gone up quite high. I'm not saying he's going to win slams.

Diallo has come through this year with a hell of a serve; he's in the top 10 for serve quality, with big power on all sides. So he could be someone to come through.

And then, as I alluded to, what'll be really exciting is that Tennis Data Innovations are starting to push out the tracking across Challengers next year. They're already doing it at the moment, in testing phases. Then you'll start to have all of this data, as you know, on the top, let's say, 300 main draw players, or even lower.

Then you'll really be able to plot some of those guys who come in. Like a young Félix: when he broke through, it was no surprise really, because he was dropping 125s at Challengers at 15 years old. So now he's doing it against whoever; of course he can, he already could. That will be really exciting. In a year's time, I'll be able to dive deeper, lower down the rankings, that stuff.

Dan Kiernan (1:20:06)

You've got to be careful, you'll have all the gamblers listening to you. That's the only problem if you get too good; you'll be a bit like Rain Man. Last couple: who's the most over-performing? In terms of, the data doesn't necessarily say they should be performing as well as they are.

Tom Corrie (1:20:28)

Shelton at the moment is obviously climbing the rankings. Where is he this week? Six, as high as six. Shelton is someone whose ranking points are ahead of his data, to date. What I mean by that is, when you're collating data at a 52-week level, it's obviously counting, as we said, all of his matches.

But to have a really high tennis ranking, you don't have to... if you make a thousand points here and a thousand points there and a thousand points there, which obviously is easier said than done, you end up with 3,000 points, which right now puts you at about 11 in the world. But you could have played three really good events and been pants at the rest of them.

I know it's not quite as simple as that, but Shelton's obviously done really well in some slams and some big events, and then he still puts in some lower-level performances at other events, which drag his scores down.

Now, his serve quality is already top 10, and as he increases the accuracy, he has the capacity to be one or two, with Mpetshi Perricard. Mpetshi Perricard is number one because... Opelka? Yeah, I could do it right now.

Dan Kiernan (1:21:32)

Mpetshi Perricard one. Opelka's got to be up there. So Shelton's 10? That's lower than I thought it would be.

Tom Corrie (1:21:43)

Nine. Nine is Shelton. That's Mpetshi Perricard, Opelka, Hurkacz, Zverev, Bublik, and Fritz, sneaky good. Fritz, because obviously his serve is big, but you don't think of it like you do with Opelka.

Dan Kiernan (1:22:03)

Well, you wouldn't pick Fritz ahead of Shelton.

Tom Corrie (1:22:03)

No, but Fritz's accuracy... I spoke to Bryan about this, actually, because Shelton used to be just outside the top 10 for serve quality, and it used to annoy me. I saw Bryan in Madrid, going back 18 months, and said, Bryan, this is his serve quality. It's actually not as high as if I was plucking a Tom Corrie number out of the air; I'd have him top three.

But his accuracy, and we've got all the measures of how often he hits close to the lines, is lower than all of these guys. And Bryan said, tell me about it. Good, because he knows it better than me; he's watching every single one of his matches. He told a nice story: I'm out there, I put the cones down, and he needs to hit the cones more often.

When it comes to accuracy, people ask about body serves. We rule out intentional body serves: we know that he hits body serves on purpose, and we ignore those. We only take ones where the tech knows he's trying to hit the T or out wide, and his accuracy was lower than other people's. Now his has crept up.

So as that continues to rise, he'll have a top five serve quality, because the serve has such express pace and such movement and deviation, all that stuff.

Dan Kiernan (1:23:12)

Yeah, I told Bryan that. He's a lovely guy, Bryan. My boys played Ben in doubles a couple of years ago, and we had a big chat afterwards. I said, I was praying he made his first serve, because the second serve was just... And Bryan said, no, no, we know. I'm trying to get him... he just wants to hit this bloody 140 every time. But getting that ball to move...

What chance do you have, especially as a righty against a lefty? People think they hate the lefty slider, but for me, it's the lefty kick that's just like, how do you deal with it? And he does it beautifully.

Unbelievable. I could talk for hours on this. It's a treat to have you go through it, so thanks for giving your time. But I can't have you on without doing our traditional quick fire round. It can be as quick or slow as you want, but quick is sometimes good. What does Control the Controllables mean to you?

Tom Corrie (1:24:09)

It means managing the things that you can manage.

Dan Kiernan (1:24:17)

Who do you see winning a Grand Slam next on the men's side, outside of Alcaraz and Sinner?

Tom Corrie (1:24:25)

I'll go bold. I should have brought him up before. My heart wants to say Jack, but I'll give it to Jack or Shelton. I'll go Shelton as well; Shelton could win a slam, I believe that.

Dan Kiernan (1:24:40)

I believe Shelton's next in line; I've said that a few times. Who were your role models in your tennis career and coaching career?

Tom Corrie (1:24:48)

When I was playing college tennis, Fed was at his peak. But I liked them all, all of the big four. And I used to have a soft spot for Henman as well, because he was a Brit who was ruling the roost when I was a teenager. And in coaching, for me, Louis Cayer is the best. You've probably had that answer before. There are other people who are great coaches, but I'm yet to come across anybody who's better than Louis.

Dan Kiernan (1:25:18)

I agree, 100%. We've talked a lot about data, but just from an aesthetic look, who are the most pleasing tennis players on the eye, in your opinion, male or female?

Tom Corrie (1:25:34)

It's tough to go past Carlos and Jannik. They're both different, but how can you not love the pure pace and athleticism of Carlos and the fluidity of Jannik? It's tough to see past those.

On the female side, aesthetically pleasing... I mean, Sabalenka isn't the obvious answer to that question, but I like watching her play. I'm going to flip it a bit: the way she takes the ball on, the way she competes, the ruthlessness of it all. I know I've gone about as out of the box as there is. She's been number one.

Dan Kiernan (1:26:20)

That's all good. If you could steal one shot from another player and add it to your game, back in the day when you were at Monmouth and picking up those ATP points, what would it be and why?

Tom Corrie (1:26:40)

I've got a list of the top 20 in front of me, and I'd probably have any of their shots. But let's see...

Dan Kiernan (1:26:50)

In history. This is in history; it can be anybody in history. The one shot you'd take.

Tom Corrie (1:26:53)

I tell you what, I'm going to flip it slightly, because I'm actually not going to say a shot, even though I've talked about shot quality, and my ageing 40-year-old body is still quite fit. But the idea of moving like... I don't even have to pick Carlos, but I'll pick Carlos, or de Minaur, or Musetti, or Cobolli.

The idea of moving like them is what I'd have, because I watch them move around their backhands, tip forehands, and I can only dream of floating like that. That's what I'd have.

Dan Kiernan (1:27:26)

I like it. I like it. If you could replay one match again, win or lose, for the experience you had playing it, what would it be? From your playing career.

Tom Corrie (1:27:38)

When you said I was world ranked, you were being very generous. I basically played about two Futures in doubles. I played one with Joe and one with Ed, when I was coaching them. I picked decent partners.

When it comes to Futures doubles, Ed was good, and Joe turned out to be very good at doubles. I played one with Ed in Portugal, and it was on clay, which Ed was not renowned for winning many matches on. He'd lost in singles to a guy who'd been 150, who was decent on the dirt. A long match.

We muscled our way into the semi-finals of the dubs, and he will back this up: for large portions of that match, because it was the same day as his singles, I was the better player. I was playing really well. Then we had two match points, and I made a double fault on one of them. And then they won the final two sets 6-2, 6-2. So I full-on gagged. I full-on gagged.

I was coaching at the time, and my ego was so invested, which we know it shouldn't be when you're trying to perform, because I wanted to walk back into the bubble with all these 16, 17-year-olds I was coaching and go, boys, what's the issue here? Just get out there and play some tournaments and win them.

I had that conversation in my head, like a foot long. I'll never forget that. So I'd have that one back, for sure.

Dan Kiernan (1:29:02)

Roger or Rafa? Should you be allowed a medical timeout or not?

Tom Corrie (1:29:10)

Yes, one. Yes.

Dan Kiernan (1:29:13)

What's one rule change you would make to tennis?

Tom Corrie (1:29:15)

I'm a bit of a purist. I haven't got any major objections to any of them at the moment, I'll be honest.

Dan Kiernan (1:29:21)

Tom, you're a star. Honestly, I absolutely loved it. It's actually quite interesting: we went through our downloads, and we sent an email out the other day. Our top downloads have actually been the more educational podcasts.

Louis Cayer is number one. Actually, no, that's a lie: Andy Murray's number one, but he was always going to be; he's way, way ahead. Then you've got Louis Cayer, then Mark Kovacs, then Dr Jim Loehr. For me, this is absolutely in that educational ilk, about what's happening in our sport, and I think people are going to love it. I did.

I'd love to get you on to get a bit more visual on YouTube as well and go through it. Keep up the great work, you and the team. Honestly, I'm fully engaged in it. I love it, and I want to keep finding out more. We'll put in the show notes where people can find out more as well, so I'm sure you can send those links in. Thank you very much.

Tom Corrie (1:30:18)

Thanks, Dan.

Dan Kiernan (1:30:18)

Thanks a lot, Tom.

Dan Kiernan (1:30:21)

So I hope you enjoyed that, guys. So many brilliant pieces of information and insight that Tom gave us. Fascinating for me, actually. One of the things I liked, and I'd like to pick up on, is that they're looking at an individual shot and the quality of it, but not always tying that to winning or losing.

Let me try and explain my thought process on this. I think sometimes as tennis people, we get so attached to the outcome that we start to lose sight of where we're looking. Take the fact that Mpetshi Perricard has the best isolated serve in the world, from speed and how close to the lines he's serving.

How does he now turn that into holding serve the most, having the most effective serve and the most effective game? I think it's nice that it's broken down that way. As a coach, I'd then want to know, okay, why is he not winning enough?

Mpetshi Perricard is a great example of that. Clearly for me he has the best serve, if you look over the course of the last year or two. But okay, so how is he now going to win more tennis matches? That's obviously very, very important for the coach to get to work on.

When we're looking at things from a data point of view, we're not getting too caught up in the emotions of the game: I feel this, I feel that. There's a time and place for that, of course, as tennis players and coaches. But sometimes we've just got to look at the hard facts of what is happening, and then be able to put the work into improving those areas.

There are lots and lots of different ways this conversation could go. I think it matters that Tom comes from that tennis background. He was a very high-level coach himself, obviously working with his brother, but also Joe Salisbury and Dave O'Hare. He's been around the game.

And I think it's important that we have people who have been around the game at that level and understand what coaches want, and then also what we want to use in terms of engaging with the fans, right? I think the ratings have been a great way of doing that. They've certainly caught my imagination on social media over the last few months.

We see it right now with Vacherot, who's winning matches left, right and centre. He's gone from 240 in the world to almost being top 30 in the world soon. But if you actually break that down into analysis of the game, it doesn't just happen by chance. He's doing things to a very, very high level.

And I'm really interested to see where this goes next. One, how we can bring in a more collective way of having data, so that there are the right data points and reference points across the board, and get that common language across our sport so we really understand it.

I think there have been a lot of ambiguous ways we've collected data over the last few years. And two, how we can engage the fans with it as well.

So a big, big shout out to everyone at TennisViz for the work they are doing, and to Tom for coming on. It's amazing to see how easily and how live it is: as matches are happening, these stats are being updated.

Imagine being able to start seeing that as fans watching on TV, and then having those questions asked of coaches as the matches are going on. That data is all available to coaches during the match. So who's going to make the differences? Who's going to make the little changes? Just like it would be on the football field or in basketball. Tennis needs to get into that position as well.

So a big, big thank you to Tom for coming on, and to you guys for listening, as always. We do have more exciting episodes. I know we've been a little bit quieter. I'm currently bringing you this from Riyadh, actually. I'm here for the WTA Finals with Gaby Dabrowski and Erin Routliffe.

Let me know if you want some insights from here. Maybe I can jump on and we can set up a live. If you do have questions, send them in, and we can get that set up as well.

Today was the WTA pictures, the iconic pictures that are taken, and it's been fantastic to see all of these superstars coming together. There's always a nice feel at these events, because everyone's had a successful year to be here, and there's that collective feeling as well. So I'm really excited to be here.

We do have other conversations lined up, and I'll let you know about one. I had a little conversation with Marat Safin, who's my age; we used to play as juniors. I've been seeing him at a lot of the tournaments, and I get on great with Marat.

I spoke to him yesterday. He hasn't done an interview or podcast before. He has promised that he's going to do one with Control the Controllables. But first, he's promised he's going to do his first one with his sister, on her podcast.

So watch out for him coming out on that podcast, and let me know if somebody gets to him before me, because I've then got Marat's promise that we're going to get him on Control the Controllables.

Lots more people coming your way. Wherever you are in the world, I hope you are well. But until next time, I'm Dan Kiernan and we are Control the Controllables.