The Match Charting Project is a crowd-sourced, volunteer effort to gather exhaustive shot-by-shot data on professional tennis matches. We’re closing in on the 5,000-match mark, and are building a wide range of meaningful datasets for subsets of players and matches. We have shot-by-shot records of nearly all grand slam finals, most Masters finals, many major semi-finals and Premier finals, all head-to-head matches between members of the Big Four, and nearly every match ever played by Simona Halep.
Here’s the complete list of charted matches, and here’s an example of the data assembled for a single player.
I hope you’re inspired by what we’ve already achieved to contribute to the project. We have several dedicated charters and over 100 people have charted matches over the lifetime of the project, but the more data we have, the more valuable the entire effort becomes. Click here to find out more about getting started.
The immediate impetus for today’s post is the updated Excel template I’m releasing today, version 0.3.0. Revising the template was a necessity ahead of the 2019 Australian Open, because of the unique new rules under which AO matches will be played. The template now handles several rules variations, including 2019 AO rules (a super-tiebreak at 6-6 in the deciding set), 2019 Wimbledon rules (a standard tiebreak at 12-12 in the deciding set), and ATP NextGen Finals rules (no-ad, first to four games, standard tiebreak at 3-3). We’ve already posted the first charted match from the NextGen Finals, last year’s title match between Tsitsipas and De Minaur.
If you’re already familiar with charting and the MCP Excel template, all you need to know is that you can enter “A” in cell B14 to indicate that the match is played under 2019 AO rules. (For 2019 Wimbledon, use “T”, and for NextGen Finals, use “N”.)
I’ve also made an addition to the shot-by-shot syntax to handle situations in which a player stops a rally to challenge (or have a mark checked) but is proven wrong. If you’re charting, check the Instructions tab in the new Excel template for more details.
Finally, the MatchStats tab now includes a running tally of total shots and average rally length.
For those of you who are already contributors to the MCP: Thank you very much for your efforts. For everyone else, I hope 2019 is the tennis season when you decide to give it a try.