Computer vision transforms tennis coaching at Billie Jean King Cup

With centuries of tradition behind it, tennis as a sport has been highly resistant to change. Other sports have been quick to embrace the use of data and analytics to transform how athletes are recruited, trained, and prepped for competitions, how they adjust to changing circumstances during play, and how they break down successes and failures after competition.

“It’s fair to say that tennis has lived up to its roots as a traditional sport,” says Mat Pemble, executive director of IT for the International Tennis Federation (ITF), the sport’s governing body. “We’ve not been one of the fastest sports when it comes to embracing new technology and data analytics, particularly on court.”

Still, the appetite for innovation is there. Electronic line calling is a prime example that Jamie Capel-Davies, head of science and technical for ITF, points to. So too is its embrace of smart racquets and wrist-worn devices, the first wave of which proved limiting in that they could provide data on how fast a player was swinging a racquet, for example, but couldn’t collect data on the outcome.

“You didn’t know whether that was a good shot or a bad shot or any other context around what was going on when you played it,” Capel-Davies says.

Serving performance data courtside

In the early 2000s, the ITF started working with Sony’s Hawk-Eye Innovations, whose computer vision system uses timing data from multiple high-speed video cameras to triangulate the position of the ball in relation to the court. The technology made its debut at the Australian Open in 2003 and Wimbledon in 2007, and it provides the foundation for electronic line calling for the sport.

“One of the byproducts of that, because you’re tracking the ball to see whether it’s going to land in or out, you actually get a lot of data through the process: how fast people are hitting the ball, where they hit it from, and where it lands,” Capel-Davies says.