My tennis, filtered like a spreadsheet

I play a lot of tennis, and for years I had the same problem every club player has. I’d come off court with a feeling about how I played. My forehand was working, my backhand wasn’t, I missed too many returns.

By chance (or good Instagram tracking) I stumbled into SwingVision, and I haven’t played a serious session without it since.

The setup is almost silly. You need your phone and a tripod to stand it on. That’s it. I bought a basic one on Amazon, set it up behind the baseline, opened the app and pressed record. No cameras, no sensors on the racquet, no one to film you.

The first surprise is the editing. A ninety-minute session has a lot of dead time: picking up balls, walking back to the line, a water break, a long argument about whether a ball was out. The app cuts all of that out on its own. What you get back is just the points, one after the other. Ninety minutes of tennis becomes something you can actually sit and watch.

The second surprise is the bit I keep coming back to. Every shot is tagged: forehand or backhand, in or out, and where it landed. And you can filter them, exactly the way you’d filter a column in Excel.

So I can ask it to show me every backhand that went long. It does. Twenty clips, one after another, and suddenly the problem is obvious in a way it never was from inside the match. Same late contact, same open racquet face, same ball sailing past the baseline. You can’t argue with that.

I’ve spent most of my career looking at data to work out what’s actually going on in a business. It never occurred to me that I could do the same thing with my own game. Now I do it after every session. Filter, watch, notice the pattern, take one thing into the next match.

It doesn’t replace a coach. A coach can tell you why the backhand is going long and what to change. But the app tells you that it’s going long, and how often, without you having to trust your memory of a match you were too busy playing to watch. Those are different jobs, and the second one used to be impossible for an amateur.

If you play regularly and you’ve ever wondered what your tennis actually looks like from the outside, try it. All you need to start is a phone and a stand.