The Hindu : Sport : Crew that never misses a point

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Sunday, Sep 09, 2007
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Crew that never misses a point

NEW YORK: Deep under Arthur Ashe Stadium is an office known informally to those who work inside as the Bat Cave. The place has no windows, but hardly a thing happens on court without someone inside knowing about it.

Anything that can be counted in a tennis match — every ace, every double fault, every unforced error — is logged and sent to a bank of computers here, in the IBM Statistics Room. The people who work here are behind the scores and the statistics that are updated online or on court in something close to real time.

Considering the scale of the Open, it is a surprisingly small operation, perhaps a dozen people in all.

Along one wall, technicians monitor a bank of video screens showing what is being sent to scoreboards around the tennis centre. Others hover over laptops or chat quietly.

Current system

The current system logs statistics for every match played at the Open. On the show courts, statisticians and radar operators record additional information, such as serve speed and location. Last year, IBM began producing DVDs for the players that synchronize match data with video. The DVDs have become popular as a training tool.

The chair umpire uses a device to record how each point ends.

That information is fed to the statistics room, then transmitted to the Open website and scoreboards around the centre.

It takes 10 days to get the centre wired and ready for the tournament. After that, the system pretty much runs itself, although there are occasional mishaps. — AP

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