So, people sometimes ask why I’m so meticulous about tennis scores, almost like a ‘score hunter.’ It wasn’t always this way, believe me. I used to be the guy who’d forget the score mid-game, mid-point even! But things change, and for me, it all changed a couple of years back.
I’d been playing for a while, just hitting with friends, having a good time. Then I got this idea in my head that I wanted to actually get good. You know, try to see how far I could push myself. I started reading about levels, like trying to figure out if I could ever hit something like a UNIVERSAL 7. They say those players usually have some outstanding characteristic in their game, and I was just trying to find one in mine! My Universal Tennis Rating, or UTR, was, well, let’s just say it wasn’t near the 11 UTR or higher you see for folks in top academic programs. More like in that ‘mid-lower’ bracket, let’s say a 6 UTR or lower, and I was trying to climb.
The biggest headache at first? Keeping track. Not just the score in a match, which, let’s be honest, can lead to World War III on the court sometimes, but tracking my own progress. Was my serve getting better? Were my unforced errors going down? It was all just a feeling. And feelings, my friends, can be very misleading. I even learned that way back, tennis scores were apparently shown on two clock faces, which went from 0 to 60. On each score, the pointer moved round a quarter from 0 to 15, 30, and so on. Wild, right? Probably still easy to argue about even then!
Then I found stuff like SwingVision. Suddenly, I had data. Real numbers. It could measure serve speed, tell you your match stats, and even help with line calling. Automated score keeping? Yes, please! No more ‘Was that in or out?’ debates, or at least, fewer of them. It was like a light switched on.
But why the obsession, the ‘hunter’ part?
Well, here’s the thing. I decided to enter this local club tournament. I practiced like a maniac for three months. I mean, I was on the court for hours, doing drills, working on my fitness, everything. I felt like I was playing the best tennis of my life. Come tournament day, first round, I get absolutely demolished. Like, 6-1, 6-0. I was crushed. Totally demoralized. I thought, ‘All that work for nothing? I’m just not cut out for this.’
I almost quit playing seriously right then and there. For a whole week, I didn’t even look at my racquet. My coach, a really good guy, sat me down. He’d actually filmed parts of my practice matches leading up to the tournament, and we had some basic stats we’d been trying to jot down in a notebook. He said, ‘Look, your opponent was just a really high UTR player, way above your current level. That happens. But let’s look at your game from the last few weeks.’
It turned out, even in that disastrous match, my first serve percentage was the highest it had ever been. My unforced error count on my backhand, which used to be a total disaster zone, was significantly lower than it was a month before. The scoreline was brutal, yeah, but the underlying numbers, the ones we’d been painstakingly trying to track, told a different story about my actual improvement. The score in that one match didn’t reflect the progress I’d made. It was a tough lesson: sometimes the final score is a liar, or at least, not the whole truth.
That’s when it clicked for me. I needed to hunt for the real story, the data, the patterns. Not just the win-loss column. That’s when I truly became a score hunter, a stat hunter. I started using every tool I could find. I wanted to understand every match, every practice session. If I had the potential to be a UNIVERSAL 7 player, I wanted to see the path laid out in numbers. If my UTR was a 6, I wanted to know exactly what I needed to improve to make it a 7, then an 8, and so on.
So yeah, that disastrous tournament was a blessing in disguise. It made me realize that just ‘playing’ wasn’t enough if I really wanted to improve consistently. You gotta dig into the details. You gotta hunt those scores, those stats, those little improvements. It’s not just about winning every point, but understanding why you win or lose them. And that, for me, has made all the difference in how I approach the game now.
