Marc
Welcome and thank you once again for joining us here on Crunching the Numbers. You have Marc Sophoulis and Shane Liyanage from Data Driven Sports Analytics. Shane, thank you so much once again for joining us.
Shane
Thanks Marc. Hi everyone hope you've had a great week this week.
Marc
Episode 6 coming to live from isolation. We are here in Melbourne obviously and confined to our households and obviously it's still a challenging time for a lot of people so hopefully you're staying safe and healthy and thanks for joining us again. Hopefully we're keeping a little bit of entertainment and tennis in your life as we continue to fight the battle of the coronavirus right across the world. Shane, so we're going to talk a little bit about... you had a great heading for this topic, it was called keeping it real, and obviously we want to keep it real in our training and make sure we simulate what we're going to obviously face come match time. But Shane, what's your thoughts around this topic and why did you choose it?
Shane
Well Marc I'm certainly not going to take credit by myself for coming up with the topic. You and I have had a number of discussions in the past about: is the practice broken or are we replicating reality in our training sessions? And how we can actually use match and training data to try and bridge that gap between training and matches so an athlete feels more comfortable or more familiar playing a match, simply because a match will feel like just another day because they've simulated it in training.
So my experience, not all but most, growing up was that a coaching session would be hits some forehands, then some backhands and a couple of volleys, rally with a mate or two or three mates and your squad for about 20 minutes and then hit some serves at the end in the last five minutes. Every now and again it would be point based, but very rarely would it be situational point play. And while I felt that it helped me technically on my game. By the time the weekend came for pennant or I was in a tournament, I felt like it was a completely new experience because in reality pressures and stresses of a match wasn't sufficiently replicated in training. I recall plenty of examples of squads I was a part of where the guys were amazing in training, but struggled in matches. They looked a million dollars in practice, but when it came to the matchday, whether it was the wind, whether it was a surface, whether it was that the ball was different. They wouldn't be able to replicate that skill or that form in practice, in an actual match. So my experience was some time ago, so not sure if a lot of this has changed in the coaching or coaching philosophy, so I wanted to really put that to you given you're heavily involved in coach education. But I also wanted to probe this further with you, with some tour statistics as context and see if, as the heading would suggest, are we keeping it real in training?
Marc
No, I love the topic and it's actually a topic that I'm going to be doing a presentation on this week on a global tennis summit, which you guys can... if you're following our social media pages you'll see me put that up, hopefully shortly, but it's a really big topic for me Shane because obviously I do a lot of coach education as well for Tennis Australia. One of my big pet peeves around coaching is that we're not evolving as a society, we're not evolving enough with what the game reality is.
Now, I'm going to liken it a little bit to my other job Shane, working AFL, so Australia footbal football and in Australian Football we coach in scenarios. So we create the scenario that the match is going to have, and then we find a way to get out of it. In tennis we generally focus on the skill. Now this has become a huge issue, because tennis is not just a skill, it's the ability to adapt under pressure with movement and decision making, to then create a skill under those under those situations. And a feel when we coach a lot of the time we generally close the drills too much and what I mean by close it is that we feed the ball too much, or we do isolated serving or isolated forehands or backhands. And we don't create a scenario that we need to find a way out. And I feel like that's where we need to get better in a coaching society is to simulate the game better. And the game for us, and we've going through the previous episodes and I'm hoping you can bring up some of those numbers again and regurgitate them for our listeners, but some of the things around the 0-4, like you know, things around 9+ rallies. I mean, we need to make sure that we are simulating more of what the game gives us, and not just getting out there and having high intensity, pointless sessions of rallying up and down the court.
Shane
So you asked me to rehash the 0-4 shots. It's about 68% of overall points and while our memory probably recalls the 9+ points because it resonates longer it's usually more dramatic. They're only about 9% of the points overall. I might add for our listeners, our data includes four years worth of data from most ATP and WTA matches. And what it's showing us is that the ATP on average - there's 631 shots hit during a match. Most matches actually range from about 408 shots to 764 shots. For the woman, it's about 530 shots, that's the average, and the majority of matches range from 371 to 645 shots. So I might start there with you Marc. Are we getting the required number of shots in a session to replicate reality and are we tracking it?
Marc
Well you know what's interesting, I think we are. The problem is we're probably exceeding the amount of off the ground hitting that we do. So like, you know, I go back to the way I was coaching and I've had to evolve as times gone on, but you know we used to get on court and a drill called the 1000 ball drill as a warmup. And the 1000 ball drill was really up and down the court, and you might do some down the line, you might do some cross both ways, but get 1000 balls in 30 minutes. Now that was a warm up for the first 30 minutes, and then you look at from the first 30 minutes, then you have a two hour session. You're probably hitting about 3000-4000 balls. So, are we exceeding the off the ground stuff, and not actually utilising the server and the return in that amount of points, or shots hit per point.
Shane
So just to jump on your point about servers, the tour averages are 84 serves for men, with most matches having a range of 57 to 102 serves, and for the women the average is 68 with the majority of matches ranging from 52 to 81 serves. And I suppose my question from this to you is a two-parter. Are we getting the right amount of serves in practice, and two, if you consider a match. You have about six to seven serves, then you return seven, and you have a three minute break, you serve again. Are we setting up our serving and return drills like that?
Marc
Yeah. It's a great point too because we in coach education, we see a lot of the time is it's coaches will go out there and they'll do a couple of drills and be off the ground, your forehand and run around forehand into rallies and into some volleys and then in the last 10 minutes of the session it's: okay we'll do some serves. And then the coach will put out some cones, and it's serve to cones. Which is great, but we know that the the amount of aces hit, especially junior level is not huge. There's always a ball coming back. So are you as a coach simulating what's going to happen on the next ball? Are you doing serve plus one or are you doing just serves?
One of the drills we came up with that we're starting to do now is: when the server is serving, then you serve plus two. And then returner goes: return plus one. So they're just trying to put a little bit of pressure on, but we don't play a full point out, we try to focus on those first four or five balls. And I think the more you can focus in on that, the match simulation kind of thing, the better we become as players. You don't want your players to look great in practice and can't play a match. And that's the thing that I think happens a lot of the time is, we talk to our kids and the kids go: oh I don't know why, but I play so good in practice and I don't play good in the match. Now that for me comes down to the coach is protecting the athlete too much in the lesson and not making the lesson look messy like a match does. And then we protect them in practice, they go to a match and they feel like a fish out of water. We have to make sure we simulate the pressures and the decisions they have to make in training, the same way they're going to have in a match.
Shane
I love you say reality is messy and I guess in a match players will find themselves in a hole, it's inevitable. For instance, facing a break point or even 0-40. So I'd like to ask you, how you prepare your players to approach a 0-40 scenario from a tactical perspective and how would that be different from say, say starting a game?
Marc
Again, I think what needs to happen more often is we need to simulate that. Now as a coach, what I try and do when we do match play or match simulation is we simulate scenarios. So, we play games where you'll have two players, or we might have four players on the court and this happens a lot in coaching. To coaches that might be listening to this and say, but I've always got four on a court, it's very hard to play matchplay. No, it's not. So what we do is we have two players playing. We have two plays waiting off. They play first to get to 30. First person who gets to 30 wins the game. So you might do the start of the game, and then you might go, okay now we do the flip side on the second set and go, we started 30-30 and it's the first one to win the game. So therefore, you're actually flipping over - Okay, I need to start the game well, but then at the critical moments I need to play the critical moments well. So I feel like in coaching we have to simulate scenarios, and that's the one key point I want to get out of this podcast. It's scenario based coaching, it's not just coaching the skill itself, because we need to put the skill under pressure.
Shane
To put it another way, you probably need to work a bit harder on a skill if it's not withstanding the pressure and the best way to do that is to try and replicate that pressure in a training environment, and then put your skill through the fire in that training session. Now I might moves back to the rally length categories and you will notice in our podcast that we do gravitate to this set a fair bit, and it's centred around the fact that most points are in that range. In order to maximise the total points, you need to win, you certainly need to dedicate a sufficient amount of time and attention to it. But going back to that 0-4 category, the average duration is about 4.1 seconds, with a lot of points ranging from that 1-6 second mark. If you contrast this with the longer rally. The average duration or the time per shot to hit the longer rally shots, it's significantly lower for the 0-4 category. So, arguably the intensity and explosiveness needs to be higher. So, I suppose my question to you Marc is, what are we doing in training to distinguish this type of intensity for this rally category in training?
Marc
Yeah, and this comes down to how you create your environment. So, what I feel happens is that we don't practice the 0-4, therefore we don't have the intensity. We generally practice the 9+ kind of stuff. Let's rally down the line, let's rally cross score and that needs to be there, absolutely 100% and I've had this debate with you before we came on to talk about that. We need that in our game. Absolutely 100%, it's for feel, it's consistency, its ball control. We need to have that and as a coach if you're not doing that then there's a problem also.
But when it comes to: do we want the player to look good or play good? My choice is to play good. So it's get them up to the court, serve big, first strike. Serve big, first strike. What are you simulating as the coach, to make sure that these plays are getting that high intensity? We do little drills as well, and you can obviously steal all the drills, I dont create all these drills, but you can steal them as much as you want to use them. Where players play a point and they have to win the point within three shots. So the server has to serve and hit only two more balls to win the point. The opponent has to try and keep themselves in the point to try and win the point. So you might have the returner going: okay I need to stay in the rally. The server going: I need to really strike here. So you have two different flip sides of how you can play and you can teach some different games styles of doing that. Now, the intensity is a huge element. Intensity goes up when there's something on the line. Very hard to simulate intensity when you're just trying to keep the ball in court. You know top players can do that, junior players don't quite understand how to do it. So we need to create scenarios, we need to create time constraints or court constraints that allow us to make sure that our intensity level stays at the match level that we expect.
Shane
That's such a good point about, if there's nothing at stake in training then you can't simulate reality and I can say from my experience on a team with a couple of players, they actually took practice points seriously. And if you talk to a few of the players, they actually keep separate head to head of practice tiebreaks and sets - that's how serious they take practice. To end on, I thought it would be good for you to share our experience with a player this year, where we use rally length data, and particularly the stats on success, or lack thereof on the 0-4 to adjust training and to try and generate more success there.
Marc
That's obviously something that we did speak about when I was coaching Nicholas David Ionel who won the Australia boys doubles this year in 2020. We spoke to him about how we're going to change his game to get a better winning ratio and we looked at the 0-4 point category and that was a big one, he wasn't winning enough 0-4. And the guy has a serve that can clock around the 210, 215, 220 mark as a 17 year old boy. And I said: what's happening here, we're not winning enough 0-4? What I found out was, he was either trying to hit the server a million mile an hour, every single time, and it was just going straight to the hitting zone, or he was just getting the serve in to start the point, trying to win the long rallies.
So he wasn't setting the serve up to be able to create a winning first strike, and that was something that I spoke to him a lot about and obviously that's changed in the past few months, but we need to obviously...and he said to me he'd never practiced 0-4 points. He'd never practiced serve and set up and never practice return and set up. And that to me was something that was a big hole in his game and I think for everyone out there if you're listening to this podcast, is practice those scenarios. Put your players into that scenario as much as you possibly can, get them to serve to start every single thing that you do. Get them to return to start everything that you do, because that's what the game actually asks us to do. If the game is asking you to do something, we need to simulate that in practice. The game wants us to be put under pressure, the game wants us to make decisions, the game needs us to serve and return every single point, but yet when you go and watch practice, we don't have those elements in our practice sessions enough.
So, if you walk away from this podcast, walk away with: simulate what the game is asking us to do as much as you possibly can. Throw in the other elements around that. Shane this is a great topic and I think we might delve into it a little bit deeper as well into upcoming podcasts because I feel like the coaches out there and the parents and the players need to make sure that everything is revolved around playing those points. And when you go on tour, the average practice warm up, or practice session pre-tournament (I'll let you in on a secret here) is we go on the court and we go... okay it's Federer and Nadal are having a practice session and they'll go warm up, middle, they'll go cross, they'll go cross, they'll go volley, smashes, warm-up serve, warm-up return. Okay, let's play some points. That's all it is, as simple as it sounds. That is how a lot of the players practice. And if we get to the point of doing what the top players do because success leaves footprints, they're doing it, they're successful, how about we follow the same suit.
So I hope people will walk away with that Shane and again, obviously, your topic this week was great. We are doing this for the tennis summit which will be on our social media pages. We'll promote that a little bit for everyone to have a look at and see what's actually happening in the world. There's some really good speakers there and you and I are doing a little presentation on that as well. So thanks again for putting in the research, thanks again for putting in the time. I do appreciate everything you do, you can find Shane at Data Driven Sports Analytics, it's all over social media, Shane Liyanage, obviously, l-i-y-a-n-a-g-e, if you didn't know how to spell Shane. But Shane thanks again for doing all the work that you do behind the scenes.
Shane
Thanks everyone. We'll be making some of the data and visuals available on The Tennis Menu and the Data Driven Sports Analytics social media pages and channels this week. Until next week. See you all and have a great week.
Marc
Thanks again for joining us here on Crunching the Numbers that was Keeping It Real - episode number six. You can find me at The Tennis Menu, thetennismenu.com for a lot of development tools. We're on social media as well, please keep in touch. Hopefully we've put a smile on your face and kept you up to date with all the latest in what happens in the world of tennis. See you next week.
For a more detailed look at Crunching the Numbers, don't forget to checkout Shane and Marc within the Coaches Cupboard, where they do a deep dive into the latest trends in the world of tennis.