Melbourne, VIC, Australia, 12 December 2024 | Matt Trollope
Simon Rea’s mission in the data and analytics space is simple.
“We want our Australians to beat the rest of the world,” he explained on The AO Show Weekly podcast earlier this year.
Yet there are few things simple about the work itself, an exercise in data mining, interpretation and translating that Rea describes as “art meeting science”.
Not all players connect with data-driven insights, and not all coaches work in the same way with the richness of data available to them. Rea and his team must determine exactly what’s required to maximise value for players and coaches – which can help them beat their opponent across the net tomorrow, or better understand their own game as they refine it over time.
“Typically we’re dealing with the coach, who’s then providing an additional layer of filtering before that info gets to the player. I think the first cab off the rank (for us) is to have a really good relationship with our high-performance coaches who are out there on the ground, year-round,” Rea explained.
“Some of them just want five full-match videos of the next opponent and they’ll spend 15 hours going through that video. Some of them want a data-driven report accompanied by a translation in notes that cuts through to them: what stands out most based off a combination of vision, data and notes? And some are somewhere in between.”
World leaders
Rea, formerly an elite-level coach who worked with Nick Kyrgios and Sam Stosur, has for the past three years worked as Tennis Australia’s senior manager of game analysis.
The shift from coaching to analytics saw him enter a space that had already been thriving at TA for the better part of a decade.
“I’m really confident in saying Tennis Australia was absolutely at the forefront; we were first in the queue of realising the importance of analytics and the role this could play both then and into the future,” Rea declared.
“I think we were the first Grand Slam nation to think about it in this way: How can we secure more vision of wherever our players are playing from around the world, and work with that vision in an analytical fashion?
“What’s happened in the decade since is that this whole industry, as with the sport, has gotten a lot more competitive and there’s a whole bunch out there more hungry to get their hands on the ingredients, if you like, and then mine the insights out of that…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at Tennis.com.au – Tennis Australia…