2016 was a great year for the Match Charting Project (MCP), my crowdsourced effort to improve the state of tennis statistics. Many new contributors joined the project, the data played a part in more research than ever, and best of all, we added over 1,000 new matches to the database.
For those who don’t know, the MCP is a volunteer effort from dozens of devoted tennis fans to collect shot-by-shot data for professional matches. The resulting data is vastly more detailed than anything else available to the public. You can find an extremely in-depth report on every match in the database–for example, here’s the 2016 Singapore final–as well as an equally detailed report on every player with more than one charted match. Here’s Andy Murray.
In 2016, we:
- added 1,145 new matches to the database, more than in any previous year;
- charted more WTA than ATP matches, bringing women’s tennis to near parity in the project;
- nearly completed the set of charted Grand Slam finals back to 1980;
- filled in the gaps to have at least one charted match of every member of the ATP top 200, and 198 of the WTA top 200;
- reached double digits in charted matches for every player in the ATP top 49 (sorry, Florian Mayer, we’re working on it!) and the WTA top 58;
- logged over 174,000 points and nearly 700,000 shots.
I believe 2017 can be even better. To make that happen, we could really use your help. As with most projects of this nature, a small number of contributors do the bulk of the work, and the MCP is no different–Isaac and Edo both charted more than 200 matches last year.
There are plenty of reasons to contribute: It will make you a more knowledgeable tennis fan, it will help add to the sum of human knowledge, and it can even be fun. Click here to find out how to get started.
I’m proud of the work we’ve done so far, and I hope that the first 2,700 matches are only the beginning.