Julia Stusek v Hannah Klugman, Tarbes, 2022
Julia Stusek, 13 years old from Germany, and Hannah Klugman, 12 years old from the UK, played in the Petits As final in Tarbes, France in January this year. Tarbes is the European equivalent of America’s Orange Bowl – a tournament in which some of the best juniors in the world play each year.
We’ve run the analytics on the final, won by Stusek 63, 63, to get an idea of where their 135 profiles sit at such a young age. We’re only going to focus on Hannah Klugman’s numbers for today, just to illustrate the value of recording analytics. Keep in mind this is one match. It’s best to have more data over time to get a better idea of a player’s profile, but this is a good start.
A quick note on the match numbers. Overall, they looked like this:
49% of points ended on shot 1, 3 or 5 compared to 50% for WTA pros.
16% of points ended on shot 2, 4 or 6 compared to 25% for WTA pros.
35% of points ended in long rallies of 7 or more shots compared to 25% of WTA pros.
Remember we’re talking about points that end on those rally lengths. They could end with an unforced error, so win rate becomes important.
Hannah Klugman's Numbers
(Pro comparison numbers are in brackets)
135 Win % As the Server
46% of points ended on shot 1,3 or 5. Win rate 39% (70%)
246 Win % As the Returner
17% of points ended on shot 2, 4 or 6. Win rate 50% (45%)
Combined 7+ Win % for both Serve and Return
35% of points ended in long rallies of 7 or more shots. Win rate 31% (50%)
We know straight away that Hannah Klugman lost this match because of her 135 win rate and her 7+ win rate. Her 246 numbers were fine. There’s more to it than that, but we’ll keep it at that for today.
Knowing that there’s a problem with her win rate on 135, we can dig a little deeper.
The graph is straight out of the 135 app. By selecting Hannah Klugman as the server, we get all her rally length data graphed on one screen. On the far left you can see that she’s doing OK on 1s ie her unreturned 1st serves compared to double faults (7 to 5).
The problem is she’s making too many errors on shot 3 and shot 5 on her own serve (bars inside the yellow circle).
It doesn’t look like there are that many rallies where she’s ending on 3 and 5, but in a sport where the percentages are so slim, winning a total of 4 and losing a total of 12 is big. Keep in mind that 12 unforced errors is 3 service games (minimum 4 points to win a game).
As an aside, Julia Stusek isn’t ending a lot of points on 246 (numbers in the lower half of the screen), which exaggerates Hannah Klugman’s problem further.
I have mentioned in many of the workshops recently the importance of juniors watching themselves play. While this isn’t possible in a lot of cases, we will be changing that in the coming weeks with the release of the 135 Cam. More on that later.
Knowing there’s a problem with a player’s 3 and 5 win percentage means that Hannah’s coach can go out and practice that part of her game in her very next practice session, rather than guessing where the match was won and lost.
If you have the video of her 3s, you can target even further. Regardless, without knowing what the problem is, it’s very hard for a coach to work on it, much less measure the improvement.
