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Hey, hey, this is Shaun with the GoTennis Podcast powered by Signature Tennis.

Check out our calendar of Metro Atlanta Tennis events at LetsGoTennis.com.

And as you're listening to this, please look in your podcast app where to leave a review and do

that for us. We would love to earn your five-star reviews. And now let's get into our recent

conversation with Dave Howell. Dave was the creative force behind UTR and is now involved with

Seven Shot Tennis, an analytics and match charting system used at every level. Have a listen and let us know what you think.

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Who are you and why do we care? Good question. I don't know why you care except if you have an audience who wants to get better playing tennis.

We may have something that they can find useful, other people are finding it useful.

And something I think that cuts across all levels of tennis. But anyway, so who am I? I'm a recovering, retired teaching pro.

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Yeah, yeah. People ask me from time to time. I said, "No, I don't teach anymore. It would be malpractice." But anyway,

at a long career, I've talked to 37 years in the Southeast Virginia area. I had some nice jobs.

One of the things, there's some things that happened along the way. I think put me in situations that

turned out to be really good situations. The first one was about 15 years into my teaching. I charted

my first match at a nine-core indoor facility in Aurora, Illinois. And my kid was on court number five.

I had to figure out a way to at least keep score. And so I had a pad of paper. One of those times when

you hear a songwriter say, "Gee, I wrote that song in 10 minutes. Well, I had some things in my mind."

And we talked a little bit about that. But that was kind of a huge thing. I had a five-year period of

time where I traveled with a really good junior player whose parents had enough money to do

take me all over the place. So that was great. We'll come back to that. When the second one was,

I had a chance to go to France for a big 12-in-1 tournament. And when I got to France, I learned about

how they rate slash rank players. A little bit different than the NTRP that was the only thing at the

time here. And then five years later, I was looking at 10 of scores in the newspaper. I don't know

how many hundreds of scores, but you remember the old days when they would print scores in the

newspaper? Yeah. It struck me. I've been looking at these things for you, but it struck me that the

most frequent score on the page was 6-0. Next most frequent score on the page was 6-1. There's

just so many matches that weren't close. But there were a lot of matches. And I came to find out that

more kids play high school tennis than play sanctioned junior tournament tennis by margin, but that's

three and a half to one. And so that was really the birth of what Game Be Known as it is known as

Universal Tennis or UTR. Collected a lot of data and ultimately came up with a way of

distinguishing levels of play. And I got very lucky with the right people showing up at the right time.

I had a guy that I was working with, Miguel Rosa introduced me to Alex Concato, who was both a

software developer and a math, very proficient in math. And he took the basic idea of what's a competitive

match, what's a decisive match and what's a routine match and put it into what you now see when you

go look at UTR ratings. That was a long haul. Other guys, Steve Clark, Darrell Cummings,

Salmon Bader. And then I was introduced to Dayfish, go to Harvard University for like 40 years.

And the big thing about Dayfish was he was just hooked into a world that was way beyond the world I

was hooked into. At 40 years of Harvard tennis players, I was Rolla Dex. And next thing we know,

we're talking to the ITA Intercollegiate Tennis Association. And we get in with them.

Being from the Mid-Atlantic area, I knew getting in the Mid-Atlantic was going to be

probably the last thing that would ever happen in my life. So the next good thing was

Northern California came into my life. 3,000 miles away, they got it. First to name Amy Jensen,

or for the USDA, NorCal. And she started doing stuff in Northern California that was fantastic.

It still is, I think. Following her, we picked up Midwest, Southern California, South West,

and finally Texas when we ended up at some point attracting some money. That's a whole different thing.

Let me ask you, "Cut your fuel, quick. When did this, what was the timeline? When did you,

when did it all start?" Started in 2005, 2006. We got to the ITA in about 2013 or '14.

And for me, Mark Leslie showed up in 2017 and said, "You guys are so dysfunctional. I'm going to

buy you out and put you out of your misery." And he did. And I got to buy a nice red truck.

I was going to say, "You don't make it sound like you're done after that." So it wasn't a buyout that says,

"You get to live on a beach, huh?" No, no, I wasn't that. It wasn't, no, no, not living on a beach.

But then that did send me back to the situation back in the mid-80s where I started charting matches.

And I went back to that. And that basically is when Steve Clark was the algorithm guy at UTR for a number

of years. And I continued to work and would be working on. So I had to tell you, if UTR was all

about what the scores were and being able to put people into levels so that they would have better

play, that was a whole intention of the thing. And a byproduct of that was, you have girls pointing

against guys, man, playing against women, junior, flading against adults. And we tested all that stuff

for about four or five years in our area here and then realized we had something pretty good.

What Seven Shot Tennis is about, well, what did you do in that match you just played? And so that's

where we get more to the granular part about, you know, how points came to an end, what happened

getting to the end of the point. And putting all of that into something that if people go to our app,

which is seven shot tennis app.com, you can go into the classic matches and look at some of the stuff

we have there to get an idea of what we do. We work, we'll work with anybody, but we have a target

out against some trying to get more college folks involved. And we're currently working with a

couple of kids who are from different areas who are good enough to get to Caledazoo and

they just both finish playing winter nationals and we put together four or five of their matches and

turn around and feed them back information. The key thing that has really moved us along with

Seven Shot Tennis was when you go to what we call the breakdown and you see all these numbers and

you say, what do we do with all this stuff? What you got to do is click on one of the numbers and

if you want to go look at videos for what those numbers represent, you learn very quickly what's

going on. And so to back up a little bit, take a step back. I've seen this, Bobby's had a brief glance

at it, but I know he wants to dive further into it. What is the three sentence version of what is

Seven Shot Tennis? It's match charting. Okay, the basic philosophy to Seven Shot Tennis.

Okay. And the first thing was what, how did the point come to an end? And it's either a plus or

a minus. One of the things that drives me crazy is watching matches on TV and they give you all the

stats at the end of the set or a match. And you added all up and said, wait a minute, there's a lot

of missing points there. Yeah, you gave me all the winners and all these aces and everything and

you gave me some unforced errors, but you're missing about a third of the points, most of which

would be points that you had to make a decision. Was that a forced error or an unforced error?

And somehow this is stymied the people that do this sort of stuff. And we think, well,

if you don't agree with this, just tell us what happened to discussion and that would probably

be pretty good to have a discussion. If you think that was forced and you think it was unforeseen,

we thought it was forced. That can lead to a good discussion. But most people will like the idea

that they get credit for hitting a good shot even for one of the winner. And there are more of those

in most cases. In most cases, probably more of those forcing type shots than outright winners.

So the philosophy is that it end as a plus or a minus minus being an unforeseen plus forcing shot,

winner, fluke, that chord, that sort of thing. Then the next thing is, well, who did it?

Who did the plus? Who did the minus? And the next three things, well, what was the stroke?

Anybody can identify four hands and back hands. But the next thing is we'll worry to go.

And that's where when you get our website, you look up and see, gee, there's this quarteter that has

one, two, three up the middle and four, five, six over on the sides and what we call singles

alleys. And then there's this touch zone up at the neck, what we call the seven.

It doesn't take very long to figure out that if you're a pretty good player, you hit closer to

the baseline than the service line. And if you're a really good player, you hit most of your winning

shots into the singles alleys, cross-board, deep, short, or down the line. That's the four, five, six.

And if you're good luck at you, in an occasional good drop shot that lands in the seven.

If you're just mediocre, you're living your life in the two. You get it over the service line,

but it never comes anywhere near the baseline. And there you are. So how can you improve your gain?

First thing you do to improve your gain, take advantage of the technology that's out there today.

There's a lot of it. Put a camera or a phone up on top of the fence,

behind the court, make sure it's angled appropriately and video you're matched.

You can figure out a lot of stuff on your own. Send us the link to the video,

we can break it down and give you. I'm not too difficult with looking at it, but there's all kinds

of ways you can filter things. And so within this complicated scenario, what your offer is,

what you do for the tennis player is if I send you a video, you're going to chart my match.

And the way I'm simplifying is say, but you're going to not just chart my match with what happened.

You're going to chart my match with exactly what happened that also essentially includes advice.

Correct? Excuse me. I'm sorry. Advice. Meaning here's where you can improve. Here's what.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we put together a game plan. Okay. But the big thing is every point we chart gets

linked to a video for that point. So let's say a match has 140 points. That's 140 videos, all of which

we'll have a caption that says this was a plus. And so I can clip, I can clip to any, I can, you link to

every clip. And I say, well, this is, it looks like it went to the only one that went to seven. Cool.

What happened there? And you will show me that point. Exactly. Exactly. That's cool. And then, yeah,

you, we have a score card, which I think is really neat, but most people want to go straight to the video.

But you can, you can filter all kinds of things. You know, I want to see all four hands and back

hands that went to the four thing out for this one or for both players. I want to see all, you know,

I see a lot of kids who and I said kids college kids as well. I haven't got a clue.

Gee, I had a great four hand, but you know, I hit 11 backhand errors and eight of them were in the net.

Not a very good correction if you're aware of it. So where is the person? Yeah. And in that case,

it's something that isn't in every obvious match charting system because, well, the conversation,

you made an error on your back, on your back. Yeah. So the conversation here where we talk about your

uniqueness that says, okay, you've got it, it's not just match charting. It is match charting with

better information, more specific information as though it's coming from a coach instead of a computer.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. There's another part of what we do that goes hand in hand with that,

which is we tag points. And what I mean by that, usually I use five tags. The first one is what we

call impact serves. Now that's my way of saying serve plus one. You know, with that term,

yeah, the sort of high enough impact that the next shot or two that you got, you were able to

feed off of that and win the point. So then you have impact returns. One of the things that we see

a lot of and some of the other people who are in this this world, players who are developing go crazy

thinking they're going to hit great returns as serve. I'd really rather see the player get through a

match with maybe one good return in one air or something like that. Whether they're getting the ball

back in play and now can you really play tennis. So then we look at impact shots that were shots

beyond the serve and return. And sometimes the player makes a really significant defensive play.

I like to show that to players and they can feel good even if it's awesome. Hey, you really play good

defense. You stole this point from this guy. And then the fifth category that I use a lot lately,

particularly with some of these kids that we see going to Calviz, some of the college kids is

what we call points of interest, which is usually where I was saying you should look at this point.

These points figure out what you did that you shouldn't have done. Like

macho returns, we discovered that a little bit with return of serve, but there's also the macho attack,

which is very, very popular these days, which is I'm going to hit the ball as hard as I can. I'm

three feet behind the baseline and I'm going to run to the net as fast as I can.

And whoops, the guy hit it back at my feet. I'm not even at the service line yet.

And I pop it up and this guy gets a passing shot. That's the macho attack. Whereas when you're

a little bit more than say two and a half three feet inside the baseline, you get the same shot,

you get in, you probably win the point on that out right or you got a pretty simple volley or overhead.

That's a tactical aspect of things. And so we we we filter things by tactics.

The eye in the baseline neutral and deep. I'm not really sure what neutral was anymore, but it's

an old term that you can use it for a long time. People understand it. Yeah. And in front of the

baseline is maneuver, attack and conclude maneuver trying to get the other player out of the

middle to court, attacking the player, trying to get to the net, including winning the point.

All along the way you could be put on defense anywhere in there and make adjustments to the

data. No, and that's good. And I'm fairly familiar with it. So I hope I'm not missing something. Bobby,

I'm sure you've got questions. No, I mean, the same thing I'd like to just simplify. So coach,

if you're somebody comes, you said, what's the you want to improve your game? What's the number one

thing you do first before you do anything else? What do you do from a tactical game standpoint? What would

you tell them? The most frequent error we see. Just a general question. I mean, the general question,

you're trying to hit too many good shots from the wrong place in the court. You make, I'll go back

to the first time I chart a match. The kid that I was working with made 51 on forced errors.

Most of those were from behind the baseline into the net. The kid she was playing made 39 on forced

errors. That's a lot. So the score was something like five and four. Went home, we looked at all the stuff.

This was long before video. And we worked and we worked and we worked. Six weeks later, she played

the same kid. There was no significant change in her strokes other than she wasn't hitting the

ball in the net anymore. She wasn't hitting them straight down the middle long to enough spin to

get that down. And the score was 6061. And she was often running and became one a couple of

gold balls was in all American in one year and then decided to turn from. It was not because of my

great understanding of the game. It was what the game was telling us when we actually wrote stuff

down. And then that created understanding a communication between the two of us. So this is

largely what we're trying to do now with Savage Odd is help players and their coaches communicate

with one another better. It has a language to it. And Bobby, this reminds me of a similar conversation

we had recently where the number you can't you can't argue with the math, right? Can't argue with

the numbers. I mean, players will don't give me wrong. I'm sure Dave has seen that too. But to be

able to as a coach go to the player and say this is the problem and point to it as opposed to I feel

like you didn't do this enough, right? It's no longer about feelings. We have the data. Yeah.

You know what, sweetie? You hit 51 balls in the net. You can figure out why you lost. So let's get

to work. Yeah. You hit it right on the head. And it's as simple as that. We're trying to do a lot of

things with what we do have. We're trying to aggregate matches and give them over a four or five

match period. You know, what will be your aggregate stuff? And you can go right to the video and see

that. That's coming out in a couple of weeks. This I think college coaches appreciate because

they can see how to have my player playing now six weeks into the season versus where we had the

player at the beginning of the season. And the same thing. And Bobby works with more high school

players than I do, which I think should be should be prime for this, right, Bobby? So how do you get them

from your point of view to say this is this is going to be good for your development? Well, I'm with Dave.

I think essentially you've made the college coach's life unbelievable eases between UTR and now do I

mean to me the analytics is great, but if the college level if they still need to be told, we have

bigger issues. I would love to see this started at a younger age, you know, and just because of

high school tennis, you have such a, you know, too many times the coach is not what you call a

qualified coach. He's the band instructor. He wants to make a couple extra thousand dollars a year.

Down here, he plays out there. So he has some familiarity with how to score a tennis game. So

boom, we're going to make him the tennis coach and, you know, all the bad habits just continually get

reinforced. How do we make this part of a package to a school to say, Hey, look, you know, we're going

to do how many matches for you or just one match because I would think you, you know, as you said,

first time you get it, things are not dramatically different from the last match they played. Nor will

they be dramatically different from to the next match they played. Other than we're giving you a

benchmark in now's the time to try to improve in the next match. Yeah, high school tennis, it's an

area that I want to crack into a little bit more. The kid that maybe so many high school players are

not as committed as the kids, the small percentage of kids who play all the big tournaments and everything.

But you want these, I mean, over my period of watching this stuff, a lot of times is that kid that's

still playing 20, 30, 40 years later, as opposed to the big star, this is, yeah, no, I don't want

anybody beating me that would never would have beaten me. So I'm like, I'll play anymore. Yeah, I don't

play anymore for that reason. Yeah, yeah. Well, there you go. You understand what I'm saying.

Keep my record intact. Exactly.

But we're marketing to what we've proven, especially the division one player, quits.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For some of the players never pick up a rocket again. So we're introducing them to

something that ends with them, unfortunately. I just think if we got the kid, and I was very fortunate,

I don't know whether I was a pitcher in baseball and undersized pitcher in baseball. So I wasn't

overpowering anybody. I had to get out people out by hitting spots on the on the plate, always changing

speech. You know, there was from the day I started, my father, you know, taught me different things

because he's like, you're not going to be big. So we got to figure out different ways. And I took

that to tennis and I could see little things of balance and that always, you know, seemingly we're

natural to me that I didn't realize I had a big advantage of other people. I just didn't have the

stroke repetitions that I needed. But I would love to interject this to the kids because I always talk

about with the chess idea that, you know, you're not winning too many times with a pawn. And what I was

going to do is, you know, simplifying the game to the look, hit it deeper, like you said. And the two

most important shots of tennis are get your first serve in and put pressure. Again, not like you said,

don't even say hit a winner. Put pressure on your opponent's second serve. And if you can do that

effectively, you probably have a very good chance of winning. So let's start by simplifying it and

here are the numbers that prove what I'm saying. You got it. That's that. That's that's exactly

the same thing we're seeing. And it's not rocket science. People people think they're going to get

some intricate plan of, you know, hit the over here and hit up high to the back end and hit all this stuff,

you know, you got to learn your, you got to learn yourself first. What do you do? And now you can

start thinking about, you know, learning the opponent. Then you're, you're pretty good at that point.

So we try to help that along. That's that's our whole reason for being.

I like the idea because it also puts a accountability with the coaches who are teaching blast off.

And, you know, I get the kids I call them, they go from crazy to lay, a lazy to crazy, you know,

they don't move their feet and then you get on them a little bit and now they're swinging from,

you know, and hitting the fence. It's like, whoa, we're trying to now go the locks. Where's,

where's just right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I like it. Just hit the two extremes. How do we get you to

just right? Yeah, that's, um, as is, well, as a former teaching pro and you guys are still at it.

I'm still trying to think I'm in the education business. This is what you're trying to teach people.

How you can become better and in your performance, it just, one of the things I do really feel good

about UTRs, you could lose a match. But if you had a good score against some guy that maybe was supposed

to beat you worse, you got better. Well, same thing in this sort of thing, your performance, losing a

match, you might be the best you've ever played and you should know the things that you did well and

continue to work on those things that, yeah, that's where the, that's where the data matters,

especially as a coach to be able to go to a player and say, yep, you lost, but look at this,

look at the improvement, look at all of these things that have changed for the better. Yeah,

and I like your example of UTR. You can take a loss, but your UTR goes up depending on what was

expected to happen in that match. And I think with data like what you have and the advice that

comes with it, like I said, it's not just charting from a magic app where it does it automatically

and it's not just charting from your mom and dad, clicking the right buttons in the app.

It really is advice. It really is coaching that comes with it that says, these are the,

these are the mistakes, but they're also a choice. It's a targeted mistake that you're able to go

through and you offer the service. So if I send in my video, you offer the service that you will go

through it as though you are my coach and you will tell me which shot went where. And then I can also

hire you to essentially be my coach and we can talk about it. Is that all? We like talking to

parents. We like talking to their coaches and just let's just all get on the same page. I kind of

want to understand, you know, what are you guys thinking about and what are we seeing and how does

all that match up? Yeah, sorry for the leading question. We have your seven shot tennis system

in our shop online. We already promote it. So I gave the leading question there to make it a

little obvious like I didn't already know. But in this case, we really like the concept because

it can help a coach like Bobby because he really knows what's going on within that information to

be a helpful player. But it can also help the band instructor tennis coach at the high school

that doesn't know too much because just by experiencing this information, he's going to know,

he or she you're going to know more. That's very well said. Absolutely. All right, I'm hired.

I'm hired. Bobby is hired me to be a sales guy. I love it from the perspective also, especially with

high school coaches that the kids usually have other coaches. And then this is one of my big

drives. I know I wish we could figure out how to do and Dave, you seem very successful at this.

So hear me out on this and come up with your next great idea. How do we, you know, in a basketball

game, the kid does something that the coach doesn't want him to do. You get to call time out or the

next whistle. You get to say, son, come right over here and sit next to me for a while. And the

kid gets to know what he did wrong. And if you don't want to do it my way or the right way, per say,

this is where you're going to be continually sitting until we do make that adjustment.

Tennis match, you got kids come in from other coaches. So the high school coaches dismissed.

Why am I my full time coach? I think it could help the high school coaches credibility. Number one,

to say, hey, look, this is an outside body telling us this. And it's a great way to try to interject

that sense of you're not doing this. It's the old you're blowing it kid. It's my favorite line in

in boxing history when Angelo Dundee looked at Sugar Ray Leonard into 12th round or the 11th

round said, you know, you're blowing this kid Tommy Harnes is beating you in the next two round

Sugar Ray went out and he's from close to you Dave. So, you know, in Maryland, but, you know, and I

just remember that and I love that. And I feel like tennis misses out on so much of that interaction

with this could help, you know, help solidify a coach play a relationship. And by the way,

Sugar Ray got involved in tennis too. Yeah. Sponsoring some players up in our area back in the day.

Anytime you can collaborate with someone else, you got to keep one thing in mind of Bobby and

and well, maybe this is only my experience. Every teaching pro I've ever met and almost every college

coach I've ever met, you got to understand they're absolute geniuses.

Yeah, we've met all of them too. They're they're they're total experts. So be prepared to try to

absorb the pearls of wisdom that are coming at you. And I was afraid you were going to say that.

Yeah, and well, I'm going to key in on the word collaboration because that's where that's what

go tennis wants to be is a force for good for tennis, but a force for collaboration. Say, guys,

why don't we all realize we're all geniuses. So let's treat each other as though we each have

something to say or we've we each have an expertise or as a coach, you know what? I don't want to chart

this kids match. So let Dave do it. Yeah, yeah, right. Get the information work together because,

you know, seven shot tennis isn't coming for your job. They're there to help. And I think people need

to hear that. I love it for the perspective also to get the kid back on the court. And I agree with

some Dave said earlier, you know, a couple of the most what it it wasn't just tennis specific,

but events where I quote unquote lost. I walked off feeling damn I did a pretty good job. And I

think that's a great way to show somebody, you know, hey, look, you know, and we had it in baseball.

I pitched a two hit or I lost six to four. How the heck do you pitch a two hit or lose six, you know,

give up six runs or a lot of things went wrong that day. So you still walk off of there saying we did a

lot of things right. We're building in the right direction. And instead of being so myopic,

you know, I we deal with this with parents of 12 year olds. We're getting ready for the orange

ball. And I'm like great. He's 12. What, you know, maybe shouldn't we shouldn't be worried about the

orange ball and oh, by the way, and I'm going to say this out loud, we might have to delete it.

Your five foot three and your wife is five foot one chances are your kids not going to be playing at

Wimbledon. I don't want to be the, you know, the downer on this Debbie downer, but these are just facts.

You know, let's let's get them to 16. Let's see how nature takes over and give them the best chance

to succeed rather than feed, you know, just kill kids with wins and losses. I'm not Dave. I'm not

cutting that out. I am absolutely going to crop it out and I'm going to make Bobby the most famous

Debbie downer. But I do want to jump rule at the end here. I want to jump to my favorite question

if you don't mind Dave and you know it's coming. So I'll jump right into it. But if you were king of

tennis and we've talked about a lot of things and a lot of people have their own expertise, their own

mindset, you come from a match analysis point of view. It doesn't have to be from that. It can be

completely different. This can be professional college, junior, social, anything, anything in your

in your mind that you can come up with. If you were king of tennis, is there anything you would do

or change? Yeah, I just want to see tennis be more fair for everybody. And I think there's some

things that I hate. Please don't cut this out. I hate 10 point matchbreakers. Okay.

Only for the purpose of shortening things up for the provider who's running the event. I don't like

no ad because there's a lot of luck involved. I mean, it's not that so much luck. Usually the serving

player is going to win the no ad, you know, the the time breaker point. But I think there's other options

where if you, if time is of the essence, short it down to many sets, but let the kids play

the real one, but then you split or you can do something I call a micro set instead of a timebreaker.

You know, let's just play play. Go someone breaks serve two more games, you know, get to

play and see if somebody can hold break serve and hold serve and that's going to end it. But if you

get to two all, I will come up with some kind of way to break it. Four point tie breaker works very

well. Let's just get to it. So that's that's a far with the king. There would be no 10 point tie break.

There'd be no 10 10 game process, no eight game process either standard tennis.

Many sets if you want to do the eight game just do two, too many sets.

Sets is so much, you know, a chance to reset. You know, you can reset when you get to do it. You can

reset at the end of the set. And let's just do that. Okay, if everybody do that, I'll be happy.

I like it, Bobby. He came with a solution. It isn't just a thing that he doesn't like. He also says,

here are the alternatives, which we appreciate with the King of Tennis.

Well, there you have it. We want to thank reGeovinate.com for use of the studio and signature tennis for

their support. And be sure to hit that follow button for more racket sports content. You can go to

letsgotennis.com. And while you're there, check out our calendar of events, great deals on

racket sports products, apparel and more. If you're a coach, director of any racket sports,

or just someone who wants to utilize our online shop, contact us about setting up your own shop

collection to offer your branded merchandise to the racket sports world. And with that, we're out.

See you next time.

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