Interpretations of the Stages of Development of Clutch Factor

When a new statistic is introduced, one of the first questions its creator must answer is “what can I do with this?” Depending on your role in the sport, there are a few different answers. A casual fan might want to know how good their favorite player is or to validate what they think they saw while watching the match. For a coach, which has some overlap with a diehard fan, they would want to know what their player can learn from the previous match to look ahead to the next one. An athlete, on the other hand, is a little bit more complicated in what they might want, but in general, what the player needs to know at a given time is what to do next. My project, headlined by the Clutch Factor statistic, has elements that can be used to serve all three purposes.

Players

What a player could learn from this project comes down to the initial intent behind it. When I worked for Georgia Tech tennis, I noticed that one of our players was taking points off at a relatively consistent rate. He would slap a return, let the ball go, or go for an overly aggressive shot early in the point. This is normal in tennis, especially for players like this one who was struggling through a laundry list of injuries at the time. We had a conversation about his pattern and why he does it that way, and I realized that there is probably a more effective methodology. Unfortunately, the season was ending, and I was about to graduate, so those calculations would not be part of my role with the team.

After I graduated, I returned to the issue, putting together a couple different ways of calculating how important a point is to the outcome of the game. My theory was that if a player needed a rest, they could use one of the less important points to do so. And this is true. If a point is not that important and you need a breather, that might be a good time to slap a return or let the ball go. As I thought about how a player might be able to use these numbers, I realized that it would play a very important role in the tactical patterns used in a point. That requires a very basic lesson in how tactics in tennis would typically work.

Each player starts out with a game plan. As the match moves on, a player might try to do something different to react to the way their opponent is trying to beat them. This changes the picture for the opponent, who reacts to that, and the cycle continues until someone wins the match. But one very important part of making a tactic effective is disguise. If you try to do the same thing on every point, the adjustment from your opponent comes faster. If you are attacking only one side of the court, your opponent might anticipate that and start a step farther over to that side. So, you want to set up your patterns in a way that the tactic that you want to use is most effective on the most important points. Let’s say, for example, that you believe that the serve that will be most effective against your opponent is a body serve. For a body serve to be effective, the returner must be set up farther into the court, because the design of a body serve is to jam your opponent and not give them time to step around the ball. The farther back they stand, the longer the ball takes to get to them and the more time they have to get into a good position and attack the return. To make the tactic work, you need to set up your opponent, hitting several serves into the corners to force your opponent to step forward to cut off the angle. Essentially, you are sacrificing the effectiveness of some points to make yourself more likely to win others. So, what points do you use to set up the opponent? The ones that have the lowest impact on the result of the match. A player could use a knowledge of what points are most and least important to take a necessary rest or to improve their tactical timing. They would not have to memorize a list – they could put a chart into their bag to look at during changeovers, they could write notes and leave them somewhere, or they could even leave the chart with their coach who would give them advice about the situation that they are in.

Point Importance

• Know when to take a rest if you need to

• Know when to set up an opponent and when it’s time to pay it off

• Know how and when to make tactical changes during a match

Coaches

Coaches are involved with the development of the tactical plan. Especially now, with on-court coaching being legal at Tour level, the coach and the player should be in lockstep on the way the tactical plan evolves through the match. That means that both the player and the coach should be thinking about using the importance of each point to properly time their tactical adjustments and set up opponents.

A player does not need to fill their head with the full picture and should only think about the short term to prevent the phenomenon known as “paralysis by analysis.” In tennis, a player must make every decision extremely quickly. If there is too much information going through a player’s head, they will make the decision too late. And in tennis, making the wrong decision is always better than making no decision at all. This practice is enabled by a coach who always has the long-term plan in mind. So, a coach needs to be constantly re-evaluating their player and finding places from which to draw lessons. That leaves them with Stage 2 of the development of this project, Clutch Factor. The importance of each point to the outcome of a match assigns that point a score between 0 and 1. If a player wins the point, its score is added to their total. If they lose the point, their score does not change. The player’s Clutch Factor is added up and averaged out over a set and over a match.

For the coach, Clutch Factor falls in as part of the bigger picture of the self-scout. In its current form, Clutch Factor is a measure of whether a player wins their points in the right order. It is important to note that this is not really a skill and having a high Clutch Factor in one match says very little about what it will be in the next match. But, in quantifying something that has largely been measured on pure instinct or segmented statistics with extremely small sample sizes like performance on “Pressure Points”, Clutch Factor enhances the coach’s picture of what their player did in a given match. That allows them to better tailor their player’s development to what is happening on the court.

Clutch Factor

• Know whether your player won their points in the right order

• Get an idea of where you might be able to find a lesson from a match

• Add it into the self-scout

Fans

It can sometimes be tricky to nail down what exactly a fan wants from a statistic. Some fans want to learn something, no matter what it is. They are easier to convince – throw something new at them and they will be intrigued. Other fans want to argue about everything. They are also easy to convince – throw anything at all at them and they will find a way to see it as a slight to their favorite player and start an argument about it. But the two types of fans that are harder to pin down are those that want to check on the progress of their favorite (or least favorite) player and those that want to know what to watch. In tennis, that last category is very important. One of the biggest complaints about tennis is that matches can be long and boring. So, giving people something to get excited about is extremely important for the future of the game.

For fans who want to know more about a certain player, Clutch Factor can act similarly to how it would for a coach. It is not an all-encompassing statistic. It does not yet directly measure a skill. However, it is an important part of the big picture of that player’s career. These fans take in as much data and information as they can and use it to formulate their opinions, and Clutch Factor is another piece of context to add to what they already know.

The most recent development in this project is for those who just want something to get excited about. For them, I have used the calculations behind Clutch Factor to create an excitement index. A slightly modified version of each point’s score is added up to create two numbers: how much excitement the match held in total and how much excitement was packed into a given point. Being able to tell how much excitement there was in a match that is already over is great, but it does not give the fans something to watch. So, I figured out how to calculate the excitement index of a match that is in progress. Development is on track to have a feature that sends an email when one of three different varieties of exciting matches is going on in time for the beginning of the main draw of the 2023 US Open on August 28. You can join the mailing list on the dweck-sports.com homepage.

Excitement Index

• How much pressure built up over the entirety of the match

• An indicator of when a match might be fun to watch

Tennis has something for everyone. Unfortunately, due to a variety of situational reasons, many people are not fully aware of how great the sport can be. Over the yearlong development of Clutch Factor, I have been able to develop statistics and features that can give everyone some insight into what the sport can give them. Part of the goal of this blog is to broadcast that to the world and bring more fans to the game that has given me so much.