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In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!
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Ashleigh Barty [AUS]Born: 24 April 1996
Career: 2012-22
Plays: Right-handed (two-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (2019)
Peak Elo rating: 2,220 (1st place, 2021)
Major singles titles: 3
Total singles titles: 15
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During this year’s Australian Open, the American player Jessica Pegula said of Ashleigh Barty, “She does everything a little bit better than everybody.” Pegula should know. They met in the quarter-finals, where Barty beat her, 6-2, 6-0, in just over an hour.
A tiny edge over the field is enough to set a player apart in this era of women’s tennis. The tour is full of talented players who have struggled to separate themselves from the pack. In the two and half years before Barty first took over the top spot in the WTA rankings in June 2019, seven different women held the position. All but Caroline Wozniacki are still active, and new contenders emerge every year.
Notwithstanding Pegula’s judgment, the gap between Ash Barty and the field felt awfully big. When the Australian announced her retirement last month, she hadn’t conceded a set in her last ten matches. Only two of those opponents kept her on court for more than 75 minutes. She owned a 2,200-point lead over then-#2 Iga Świątek in the official rankings. In her last three seasons, she played matches against top-tenners 23 times. She won 19 of them.
It had been a long time since the WTA boasted such a clear number one. In some categories, such as her precise forehand and her ruthlessly executed tactics, Barty probably was just a hair better than the strongest of her peers. But in other areas, her game could barely be measured on the same scale. She was one of the few 21st-century players to rely on a backhand slice, a shot that most active players use only as a last resort. And while she was one of the shortest players on tour, she got more out of her serve than anyone else.
For years, fans had an easy retort for any naysayer claiming that women’s tennis was boring: Watch some Ash Barty. With the Australian’s retirement at age 25, the sport lost one of its best and most unique performers.
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Let’s start with the slice. Volunteers have charted 28 of Barty’s matches from the last year for the Match Charting Project, and in those matches, she sliced 68% of her backhand groundstrokes. Tour average is about 13%, and since that number is propped up by Barty and a few other extreme outliers, the median is a couple percentage points lower still. No matter which number you prefer as representative of the tour as a whole, Barty hit her slice more than five times as often as her typical opponent.
In previous generations, especially in men’s tennis, slice backhands covered up for weak flat or topspin strokes. You might conclude that someone who hits a lot of slices isn’t that good off the ground. Though Barty’s slice certainly wasn’t the equivalent of the devastating Aryna Sabalenka backhand or Simona Halep’s unbreakable stroke, she held her own.
The following graph shows every player in the WTA top 50 with at least five charted matches in the 52 weeks preceding this year’s Miami event. The horizontal axis is slice percentage (as a fraction of all backhand groundstrokes), from 2% for Alison Riske up to 68% for Barty. The vertical axis is return points won, from 39.8% for Liudmila Samsonova to 48.5% for Halep.
The main reason to visualize this is to emphasize just how extreme that 68% slice rate really is. The next highest belongs to Sara Sorribes Tormo, at 48.5%, and her stubborn, passive game is as unusual as they come.
The plot also shows that while Barty was hardly an elite returner like Halep, Sorribes Tormo, or Iga Świątek, she was better than average. After Indian Wells, she ranked 16th in percentage of return points won among the top 50 players on tour. There’s no strong relationship between slice percentage and return points won, and for those few women who rely on their slices, it’s possible to construct an excellent return game around what is typically a defensive shot.
Pundits tended to overemphasize the novelty value of Barty’s slice, but there’s plenty of evidence that her backspin backhand was no liability. On average, opponents served much more to her backhand than to her forehand–almost twice as often in the ad court. Yet the Aussie won about the same number of points on both wings when a serve landed in one corner of the box or the other. She didn’t hit quite as many return winners as the average woman on tour, but even for the most aggressive returners, that rate is usually in the single digits. Return winners are better for highlight reels than for a coherent tactical approach. Barty’s slice, by contrast, reliably neutralized points and snatched the server’s advantage from her opponents.
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The Ash Barty skill that truly separated her from the pack was her serve. Between last year’s Miami tournament and her retirement, she won 65.5% of her service points. The entire WTA top 50 is jammed into a 12-percentage-point range between Barty and Sorribes Tormo at 53.4%, yet Barty still retired with a 3-point lead over the second best player in this category, Belinda Bencic.
There is hardly a serve-related category that the Australian didn’t dominate. In the same time frame, since Miami in 2021, she hit 10.4% of her deliveries for aces, a tie at the top of the list with Karolína Plíšková. She won 76% of her first serve points, more than 4 percentage points above the next best player, Elena Rybakina. Barty was one of only three women in the top 50 winning more than half of her second serve points. Combine all those advantages, and she held almost 84% of her service games. No other woman held as much as 78%, and fewer than one-third of top 50 men–in a much more serve-dominated game–held as often as Barty did.
Even Serena Williams posted only a handful of seasons in which she won service points at a higher clip than peak Barty.
You get it, I hope. Barty’s serve wasn’t just good. It wasn’t just a little better than everybody else. It was probably the most valuable single shot in women’s tennis.
And it shouldn’t have been possible. Barty is five-foot-five-inches tall. That’s four inches shorter than Serena, six inches shorter than Naomi Osaka, and eight inches shorter than Plíšková, her only equal in the ace category.
Here’s another graph, this time showing height (on the horizontal axis) and percentage of serve points won for every player in the WTA top 50 when Barty said goodbye.
You don’t need a scatterplot to tell you that tall people tend to serve better than short people, and this particular plot won’t contradict you. The three women in the top 50 who are shorter than Barty–Camila Osorio, Jasmine Paolini, and Yulia Putintseva, are among the weakest servers in this group. Most of the best servers are among the tallest women on tour.
Then there’s Ashleigh Barty. It’s almost as if Diego Schwartzman were outserving John Isner. But Barty’s signature weapon was so effortless, and she wielded it for so long, that we rarely noticed how unusual it was.
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All of this leaves one giant unanswered question. How did one of the shortest women on tour get Serena-like results?
Barty didn’t hit as hard as many of her peers. 20 different women hit at least one 115mph serve at the 2022 Australian Open, and the champion wasn’t one of them. She made up for it by doing everything right, from technique to tactics.
The one statistical serving category in which Barty lagged behind tour average was the rate at which she made her first serves. The typical top-50 player lands 62% of them, and in her last 52 weeks on tour, Barty’s number was 59%. She took more risks on the first serve, a necessary part of the approach for a five-foot-five server to hit so many aces.
High-risk first serves were a particularly important part of her tactical arsenal on clay. Five-time doubles major winner Paul McNamee explained, “If you just hit an 80% first serve on clay, it is coming back; on a hard court, not necessarily.” Barty applied that reasoning across surfaces, aiming for the corners with nearly every first serve. And thanks to flawless technique, her opponents rarely knew which corner.
Another reason to take chances on the first serve is that her second serve–at least relative to the average tour player–may have been even better. Barty got far more kick on her second serve than most of her peers did, forcing opponents to hit uncomfortable returns at heights they hadn’t practiced as much. Barty’s coach Craig Tyzzer said, “Most players like to get the ball at hip height but when you do a kick serve you’re basically putting more rotations on the ball, so it jumps quickly off the court and often changes direction. Not a lot of girls hit kick serves, so it’s a definite point of difference.”
Barty said of her focus on the serve, “It’s more about the placement, thinking about what kind of return I’m going to get to try to set up the rest of the point.” As we’ve seen, she hit as many aces as anyone on tour, but she didn’t have to. If every serve came back, she’d still have been in good position to end the point on her second or third shot.
There’s no single answer to the puzzle of Barty’s serving prowess, because in this area Pegula is right. The Australian did everything a little bit better. When you combine all those incremental gains across every aspect of the serve, you end up with a devastating weapon.
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There’s one more quality that separates Ash Barty from the typical player, and it’s been all over the news for the last few weeks. Even before her sudden retirement announcement, she kept tennis at arm’s length and was always willing to step away from the game–even when she was at her best.
She never played more than 20 events in a single year, and she said her permanent goodbye to the tour after one of the most dominating starts to a season in recent memory. Her final WTA ranking was based on 13 tournaments, while Barbora Krejčíková had played twice as many events and Paula Badosa counted a whopping 31. Barty skipped the entire 2015 campaign, and in 2020, she stayed at home rather than grapple with Covid restrictions in order to play the US Open and Roland Garros.
The layoffs were as strategically sound as every other part of her game. When she came back, she was often better than before. After her first long layoff, she won her first comeback doubles tournament, and when she resumed singles competition later that year, she won 13 of 17 matches. She missed nearly a full year to the Covid-19 pandemic, then won her first tournament in 2021. Five months later she hoisted her first Wimbledon crown.
The last couple of decades have seen enough high-profile comebacks on the women’s tour that it’s easy to imagine Barty picking up her racket again. Her personality suggests otherwise, and her career results leave little for her to prove–at least in tennis. It may turn out that she’s just a little bit better than everyone else in her next pursuit, as well.