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Do any of you longtime coaches/ teachers/players have any comments on the tennis artificial intelligence and computer vision revolution information overload that is coming? This website and forum seem to me to be a good source to find voices of reason that might help us not to go down “rabbit holes”. I noticed that Statsperform, a leading Sports AI industry leader (I think O’ Shannessey/ Novak work with them), has global offices, but not one in the U.S.
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Stats are great. They can tell you so much. They can also sometimes tell you nothing. They won't tell you the tiny things (often psychological) that cost a player a set or the match.
Stats often tell you what you didn't see because your attention was over focused somewhere else -- to me this is the greatest value of keeping stats.Stotty -
Agreed. Experience gives birth to wisdom to interpret what we see and hear before application.Originally posted by stotty View PostComment
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It's a tool, just like video, or knowing your VO2MAX, or how many grams of protein you need, or your spider drill times, or ball speed/mph.
Information is not bad, but it's on you to use it correctly.
Stats tell you where to look but not what to see.
Your returns in play % is great, but your break point conversion is not, is it a nerves thing, or are you too conservative with the return on important points?
A disproportionate number of forehand misses are wide, technical issue?
Higher percentage of errors on balls hit when moving left, footwork issue? Ball recognition?
As a coach, just like a player, if you are not getting better, you are getting worse.
JComment
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Tom Byer developed a great system of soccer for Japan. His idea was that improvement in soccer comes for a whole group of people. This should start with basic soccer instruction even for the lowest levels. He thought that if you improved the quality at the bottom it would trickle up.Originally posted by J011yroger View Post
He was a huge success and even had short commercial segments on TV in which he taught parents how to do some basic soccer exercises at home. The US finally hired him back and the first thing they wanted to know is how to measure progress. They wanted clear tangible proof that his system was working at the individual level. His system is not setup to see individual improvement. Eventually, he quit and was hired by China.
Stats are great but in the end, tennis like soccer is a human activity. As long as it is human, there will be no way to measure all of the little things that add up to a whole tennis player and influence each match and each point.
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The one stat that kills me is O'Shaugnessy's idea that approaching the net has always led to 70% of points being won. According to him, that was true in the 70's and it is true today. The problem is that when you come in 100 times like Sampras did in the US Open final in 2002 and you come in 20 times in the final of a match today, you cannot compare percentages. I think people have the same percentage because they come in less than they did before. Mischa Zverev comes in a lot and he does not win 70% of his points at the net.
If we setup a serve and volley challenge, where people had to come in as much as possible, we would see that the percentage would drop a LOT.
Volleys will always be important but the technology has changed. When you can hit a ball at someone's feet from 10 feet behind the baseline it changes everything. So players adapt.
This is an example where stats do not tell the human story.Comment
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Agree 100% people come to net when they have the feeling that the odds will be in their favor, making them do it more will blur the lines. It's like saying that a basketball team has a great % on making 3 pointers so they should shoot more 3 point shots, but in reality their percentage is high because they only take the shot when they have a good opening. Nadal has an amazing conversion percentage on net points because he only comes in to finish off ducks. I have a great win % when hitting 2nd serves to the FH of my opponent, because 90% of the time I go to the BH so they are surprised when I switch it up. If I am 50/50 serving to the backhand on 2nd serves and 75/25 to the FH does that mean I should serve more to the FH? Probably not.Originally posted by arturohernandez View Post
My personal peeve with COS is that he says most points end in 3 shots so you should spend a lot of time practicing serve+1. I think that is useful, but the reason you hit 100 balls in practice is so that you can make that 1 in a match.
JComment
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Awww...just stick it where the sun don't shine. Ah...living out in the country. Communing with nature. Pissing outside 99% of the time. Backwards living. Talking to a farmer on the limited occasion. It's an eye opener. A revelation. When the shit hits the fan I would take the five men in the two mile radius of my abode over a thousand feminist politicians. I'll take Anders, Gunnar, Christer, Jon and Roland. These guys can fix anything. They can build anything.
With every invention comes a curse and this curse didn't take a lot of time to develop. With AI...the entire world of sheeple have been convinced to capitulate to the machine. To AI. Losers. Devolution...just like tennis. So happy with the electronic devices that will end up being the death of you. They are killing you now. The EMR...Electronic Magnetic Radiation. Killing so silently. So stealthy. Like an assassin in the night. Like an unseen virus. The surface of the sun is called the Corona...btw. The sun gives off a bit of EMR from what I am told. Come to think of it...AI is probably running the show now. Have you ever heard of "Singularity"? Just think...what if an American Presidential election was manipulated by the machine?
Old enough to remember how it worked. This coach had his following. The coach on the other side of town had his. The surrounding municipalities had their coaches and their followings. There was competition. Free and open competition. It was like the food chain. You ate your way up...or you were eaten. You learned the hard way. No soft balling. Dog eat dog. It taught you a thing or two. Nothing was handed to you. You want it...you take it and pay the price.
Artificial Intelligence. The real impact on Humans by Artificial Intelligence. I made up a word...virtual morality. You've heard of virtual reality. Virtual morality occurs when "God is Dead" and the computer become the deity. It's happening. This is what all of this modern thinking is about...virtual morality. Rewriting human values and existence with the cold, clinical morality of a hard drive.
The best contribution of the whole nutty paradigm is video. O'whatshisname. Who cares? Pure and utter nonsense. Tennis for Dummies. You can have it. I've got my Coach's Eye and I'm not talking about the AI version.
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DB: if you have the patience : a 750 page report of U.S. govt response to AI. Your comments on AI in tennis as part of the bigger picture of life are eerily prophetic.
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That reminds me of the story about the plumber who comes in to deal with a noisy pipe. Then he gets his hammer and bangs on the pipe. They turn on the water and the noise is gone. When he says "that will be $150 dollars" the client complains that they are paying him to hit one pipe. He says, "no you are paying me for knowing that if I hit the pipe like that, it will stop making noise."Originally posted by J011yroger View Post
I do think that practicing serve and return helps and I do it with my daughter. But we also practice to give her rhythm without serving or returning. She needs to feel a certain way about her shots in order to be more positive and serve, return, serve+1 and return+1 better.
I am not sure if we just served and returned all the time that it would be ideal.Comment
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The problem is that AI is still a natural system and is dictated by the laws that govern the living world. Teilhard de Chardin wrote about this a century ago in his book The Phenomenon of Man. You cannot escape that the laws of nature apply to our manmade world.Originally posted by don_budge View PostAwww...just stick it where the sun don't shine. Ah...living out in the country. Communing with nature. Pissing outside 99% of the time. Backwards living. Talking to a farmer on the limited occasion. It's an eye opener. A revelation. When the shit hits the fan I would take the five men in the two mile radius of my abode over a thousand feminist politicians. I'll take Anders, Gunnar, Christer, Jon and Roland. These guys can fix anything. They can build anything.
With every invention comes a curse and this curse didn't take a lot of time to develop. With AI...the entire world of sheeple have been convinced to capitulate to the machine. To AI. Losers. Devolution...just like tennis. So happy with the electronic devices that will end up being the death of you. They are killing you now. The EMR...Electronic Magnetic Radiation. Killing so silently. So stealthy. Like an assassin in the night. Like an unseen virus. The surface of the sun is called the Corona...btw. The sun gives off a bit of EMR from what I am told. Come to think of it...AI is probably running the show now. Have you ever heard of "Singularity"? Just think...what if an American Presidential election was manipulated by the machine?
Old enough to remember how it worked. This coach had his following. The coach on the other side of town had his. The surrounding municipalities had their coaches and their followings. There was competition. Free and open competition. It was like the food chain. You ate your way up...or you were eaten. You learned the hard way. No soft balling. Dog eat dog. It taught you a thing or two. Nothing was handed to you. You want it...you take it and pay the price.
Artificial Intelligence. The real impact on Humans by Artificial Intelligence. I made up a word...virtual morality. You've heard of virtual reality. Virtual morality occurs when "God is Dead" and the computer become the deity. It's happening. This is what all of this modern thinking is about...virtual morality. Rewriting human values and existence with the cold, clinical morality of a hard drive.
The best contribution of the whole nutty paradigm is video. O'whatshisname. Who cares? Pure and utter nonsense. Tennis for Dummies. You can have it. I've got my Coach's Eye and I'm not talking about the AI version.
Like anything we need balance. Computers are great until you have to sit in front of a screen for everything. This pandemic and the extremes of screen time might just get us out of our caves and back to the natural world.
Here is hoping!Comment
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