The Battle of the Surfaces

Every tennis fan knows the folklore: clay rewards grinders, grass rewards servers, hard courts reward the complete player. As a lifelong tennis player I wanted to know how much of that folklore survives contact with data, so I wrote “The Battle of the Surfaces” for the Sports Analytics Group, analyzing which playstyles actually win on each surface.

The fun of the piece was operationalizing “playstyle”: turning fuzzy labels like aggressive baseliner into measurable statistical signatures before asking which signature wins where. Some folklore held up beautifully; some of it turned out to be commentary-booth mythology.

It was also my first lesson in writing analytics for readers who came for the sport, not the statistics. Every chart had to earn its place in the story.