Wimbledone

Wimbledon 2015 2The past couple of weeks have seen a feast of tennis in SW19 as Serena Williams triumphed in the Ladies’ Singles and Novak Djokavic in the Mens’. But while most people’s attention was focused firmly on Wimbledon’s 19 courts, for a small team of technicians and statisticians from IBM, the real action was taking place in a couple of small, air-conditioned rooms close to the Hill where thousands of people who don’t have tickets to the show courts gather each day to watch the action on the giant TV screen.

IBM has been Wimbledon’s technology partner for 25 years, and takes massive pride in both the volume of data it collects, and the speed with which it makes it available to TV commentators, its own social media team, and the millions of people keeping up with the action via the Wimbledon app or .com site, both of which were built by IBM.

It all starts, of course, with the tennis. For each Wimbledon tournament, IBM has a team of around 150 people whose job it is to collect, analyse and distribute the data. The process starts with a team of three very good tennis players on each of the main courts. One of them reports on the speed and placement of the serve, and counts the number of shots in the rally. The second calls each point, effectively a running commentary on the match in progress. The third inputs the data into the system as quickly as possible.

“We need to have people with a good understanding of tennis at courtside,” says Sam Sneddon, the man in charge of the IBM Wimbledon operation. Sneddon comes across as a very affable chap, and I guess perhaps he ought to – he splits his working life between Wimbledon and Twickenham, where he also runs IBM’s technology partnership with the English Rugby Football Union. Not a bad job, though I guess he sees more PC screens than he does cross-court winners.

Live scores
As he gave me the tour of the ‘Data Bunker’ Sneddon showed me how the live scores in the Wimbledon app update in near-real time. “I was watching at courtside the other day and at the end of a rally, the score updated in the app before the umpire on court had announced it,” he says.

There are two people calling the data in on the non-show courts and one on the outside courts, so there’s less data recorded, but it’s still done in near-real time. It all adds up to around 3.2m data points over the two weeks of the tournament.

On a giant screen, Sneddon takes me through one typical point and the data we are looking at. Reading across from left to right, it shows which point it was, (first, second, third etc.); who served; who received; first and second serve speed; placement of serve; how the serve was returned; how many shots in the rally; who won the point, how it was won; where the players were (baseline, net etc.,); when the point was won; and the score.
The IBM team have the scores from every match played at Wimbledon dating back to 1877, with much more detailed data dating back to 1990, when the IBM/Wimbledon partnership was established.

The TV crews and journalists reporting can filter this tsunami of data in all manner of ways, looking at the stats on individual players, head-to-heads, and for each match, drilling down into the data in lots of different ways. 20 minutes after a match has ended, the players involved in it get the data too on a memory stick, complete with a video replay of the match. The video comes complete with a user interface that enables the players to filter the footage, to show, for example, just their unforced errors, or backhand winners, or service faults. It’s impressively comprehensive.

Social media is also a big part of the operation. IBM uses a GNIP Twitter host feed to monitor which players, matches and incidents are being discussed on social media, with all non-tennis content (such as how the tube strike is affecting travel to Wimbledon for example), stripped out using Watson Content Analytics. This enables the social media team to capitalise on the social hotspots.

Responsive site
In the second room, I meet Andy Burns, who looks after the .com site and the app. In previous years, Wimbledon had a dedicated mobile site, but has gone responsive for the first time this year. He shows me how the content changes as the screen size increases from a mobile to a tablet to a PC and beyond.

On mobile, the first thing you see – sensibly – is live scores. As the screen size increases, the tiled content gives way to a more visual presentation showing the Wimbledon grounds in all their glory, with a still image of sprinklers watering the courts. As the screen gets a bit bigger, to laptop or desktop PC size, the still image changes to a moving video showing the same scene. Go bigger still, say to the size of a large monitor and – neat touch this – the site display changes again. The main part of the site remains the same, but the additional real estate to the right of the main site is now occupied by a panel showing live scores from a selection of the games. Scroll down to see any below the fold.

I ask Burns about the possibility of a Watch app for next year and he seems enthusiastic about the idea, noting how much easier it would be to look at a score update on your wrist than on your phone. His enthusiasm may be tempered somewhat, however, by the fact that Rolex is one of Wimbledon’s official partners…

I ask also about the split between mobile and desktop traffic to the .com site and he tells me that more visits come from desktop – a factor of people checking in from the workplace – but that mobile users are more engaged, driving 70 per cent of total page views.

Whatever your thoughts on tennis as a sport, you can’t deny that IBM’s coverage of the action is, if you’ll excuse the pun, ace.