Benchmarking Junior Tennis Stats pt 4

At Next Level Stats, we just upgraded the more than 150 player benchmarks we use for giving junior players better context for their match stats, and I noticed a few interesting trends in the data. Here are some of the areas that stand out for lower level-players as they move from UTR 4.5 to 11+.

WHAT ABOUT WOMEN

While the number of women’s matches available didn’t allow for as detailed modeling as with the men, the higher-skilled women follow many of the same patterns as the men. For example, women clearly demonstrate increasing serve speed and depth. From the lowest tier to highest, women increased their first serve speed by 33% on average and second serve speed by 31%.

Interestingly, women tend to hit more overheads into the net at the lower levels--more than 1 out of every 5 overheads for UTR ~4-8.5. At the same level, men do this 1 out of every 10 times, and then both go to essentially zero past this level (I did this three times in a match last week, and I think knowing this figure ahead of time affected me deeply).

Photo: Andy Cheung/Getty Images

Check out the previous posts in this series.

WHAT'S NEXT

We’re excited to take this next step in our understanding of junior tennis. Areas for further research include parsing the data for each stat's reliability at lower levels versus higher levels, looking for meaningful differences in these stats between those who won sets and those who lost sets, and starting to look at patterns on high-leverage points–like break points and set points. With more matches, especially for the women, the differences between these tennis skill levels can only become more clear.