Letâs start with a pop quiz: How many aces has Serena Williams hit this year? Who leads womenâs tennis in percentage of service games held? Who breaks serve more often than any woman on tour? Who fights off the most break points? Whose second serve is the biggest liability?
Iâd love to tell you which women are the best and worst in these categories, but sadly, your guess is as good as mine. No one knows the answers to those simple questions because the WTA Tour, just a few years shy of its 30th birthday and representative of the most successful women athletes in the world, is less sophisticated than most backyard Wiffle Ball leagues when it comes to data.
How can it be that in the year 2007âduring the golden age of information technology on a planet where those who live in reasonably successful economies often have more difficulty trying to avoid information than they do trying to find itâthat one of the premiere sports in the world doesnât track basic stats about its players? Perhaps this wouldnât seem so strange if the tour wasnât sponsored by technology giant Sony Ericsson, which makes hundreds of millions of dollars on phones that send text messages and e-mails, browse the internet, and find you the closest pizza joint in whatever town you happen to be wandering around. Yet its sport of choice canât count aces.
The tour doesnât have to look very far for help. The ATP has tracked basic data for years, and puts it up on its website every week. (The âMatch Factsâ section has its own sponsor, Ricoh.) The International Tennis Federation meticulously gathers data at the Grand Slams, including stats from womenâs matches. The tour would simply have to take that information and supplement it with its other events. Many of those tournaments, by the way, already keep their own stats. The Sony Ericsson Open (thereâs that name again) in Miami is one. It took me all of 30 seconds to find the tournamentâs website and learn, much to my surprise, that Serena Williams only won 48% of points on her first serve against Justine Henin in this yearâs final, which Serena won 0-6, 7-5, 6-3 (she won only 41% in the second set, 11 of 27).
Andrew Walker, a spokesman for the tour, was sympathetic to a plea for a few more morsels of data.
âWeâre absolutely committed to providing a level of statistics that our fans and the media are going to be satisfied with,â he said. âWe are obviously not there yet.â
The question is, when will they get there? Walker couldnât say; from our conversation, it seemed that 2008, and perhaps beyond, would be another lost year in terms of data. He agreed that lack of stats is no longer a budget issue, as it once was. At the moment, the WTA is flush with cash, having recently signed Sony through 2010 for $88 million and accepted separate three-year, $42 million bids for its season-ending championships (in Doha, Qatar, from 2008 to 2010 and in Istanbul, Turkey, from 2011 to 2013). What the tour needs to figure out is how to spend the money, Walker said.
Thankfully, the WTA didnât drop much cash on its one statistical innovation this season, the âPower Index.â Walker described it as âlower hanging fruit,â something the tour could implement because of new data offered by Hawk-Eye (the line-calling system) without further expense.
In theory, this sounds great. In practice, âPower Indexâ is, and I say this without hesitation or a hint of exaggeration, the most worthless statistical compilation Iâve ever come across in a life devoted (trust me â for worse, not better) to watching sports and digesting largely useless data over breakfast.
The Power Index takes the fastest speed of seven shots (first serve, second serve, forehand, backhand, first serve return, second serve return, and overhead) and averages them to deliverâvoila!âan utterly useless number. (Many statisticians come under fire for comparing apples and oranges; the WTA, not to be outdone, has developed a formula that treats apples, oranges, watermelons, grapefruits, spinach, rocks, and water as equals.)
Set aside the fact that the WTAâs sample size is miniscule (it can only track this data at events that use Hawk-Eye). Then ask yourself, what does it mean when the towering Venus Williams leads the Power Index at 98.8 mph, just above the tiny Maria Kirilenko, who rates at 98.6 mph? Hereâs the best answer I can come up with: The hardest shots of both players, on average, are REALLY hard, even if the ball doesnât go in. And anyway, last time I checked â it does matter whether the ball goes in or not.
Perhaps this shortsighted approach to data derives from the fact that tennis is not seen as a statistical sport, unlike baseball, basketball, and football. But it should be. The ATP does well with its with data, but it could do better. Hawk-Eye allows you to track how much players run in matches; it can pinpoint where a player stands to hit shots and return serves, which could easily lead to an interesting positioning index, or some unique analysis of footwork or efficiency; there are cameras available that measure the rotation (spin) of the ball.
New technology should make tennis statistically rich, attract more fans, and improve media coverage. Unfortunately, weâre still trying to understand why the WTA hasnât even become statistically relevant.
Tom Perrotta is a senior editor at TENNIS magazine.