This year, technology is also taking center court as more athletes turn to data and AI

to improve their play. We spoke to IBM senior vice president Jonathan Adashek and retired American

tennis pro Sam Querrey on how IBM's new app is changing the game and coaching and

its games that match.

We are so excited. I mean, this is our thirty fifth year with the US Open,

and they've been such a great partner. It working differently and trying new technologies. And this

year, we've got a lot of amazing new features. First is the live updates. So think

of it as your home page. When you log in onto the app, you get what

you want right away. You don't have to go navigate through. So it really gives you

a much more engaging, quick, responsive experience. Then we've got serve quality. Serve quality usually, you've

looked at serves and you just Is this an objective measure? It it is data driven.

Okay.

It is data driven. And, you know, Sam Sam was a big server.

We're

gonna get his take on this

a bit.

And serve quality looks at 21 different points of the body, looking at the limb movement,

looking at racket movements, putting that together, and getting a serve quality score so that you

can really understand was that person hot, were they cold, what was going on more than

just how many miles per hour that fat that serve went. Then we've got the match

chat feature, which is building on last year where you could ask a question about what

was going on. This allows more natural language processing, but it's also bringing in photos and

videos into the answers, which is really a next level of engagement on this. And finally,

it's about key moments. Key moments is really looking beyond just the obvious, oh, they won

this set. It's looking at how long was a rally. Did you get a big did

a player get an ace to win a set? What are these moments, those more subtle

moments to give a better storyline to pull through so people can understand more of how

the tide is changing in the match?

I feel like this would be helpful for me. I do actually watch tennis, but all

the other sports balls that my co anchors watch that I do not when we have

to recap the game. I could just read it off the AI and then be like,

what were the key moments? And then I could pretend that I had watched the game,

but I would never do that to Sam, when you played I mean, it hasn't been

that long, but I feel like the data has gotten so much more aggressive for all

athletes in the last couple years. Like, when you're serving, do you want me knowing exactly

how good each one of your serves is, or would you rather people just kind of

went off vibes?

Well well, if I'm serving, the opponent, I I don't have a choice of what they

know. So I think a lot of times it comes down to the coach now. The

coach will actually now use the the IBM app. They'll go on the app, look at

all the data points, and then maybe give their player two or three obvious points. Because

as a player, I can't think about 15 to 20 different things if I'm returning or

serving.

Right.

That's where the comes in. If there's data that they can look at that's obvious, they

can then give that to the player, and the player can kind of go with those

three or four bullet points.

But do you think anything gets lost? I mean, I I know that the line calls

now are kind of automated. I personally kind of miss people fighting over some of these,

like, like they still fight? They still

they still put it up for a close call. Alright.

It seems a lot less good takers than it used to be. But, like, Sam is

like, is do you lose any of the the naturalness of the game if you're getting

too data driven with some of this stuff?

You know, no. I don't think. Look. The winner of the US Open this year, they

just put out yesterday, gets $5,500,000. You can't miss a line call by a few inches

when there's that much money on the line. And and going back to my previous point,

yes, the data is is nuts right now. Right? You can have a thousand different data

points.

Yeah.

And the players aren't gonna look at all of it. But, again, that's where it kinda

comes down to the coach and the team. They can look at all of it and

then decipher what they feel is important for a particular match or matchup, you know, for

their particular player. But it's so nice for the coaches, especially, to have all this data,

and they can really pull back the layers and and kinda see, alright. What going back

to those key moments. What are the key moments of the match? You know, if you

win a rally over 12 shots, is that gonna help you? If you save a certain

number of break points serving in this location, is that gonna help you? So you're able

to just get so much deeper in the information now, and that's so helpful once it

trickles its way to the players.

I'm gonna describe this for our listeners and for those who may have missed it. But

as Sam was talking, Jonathan, you had a very self satisfied acknowledgment there of him saying

that coaches are using the IBM platform here to kind of give tips to their player.

That's pretty wild. I I think if, you know, there there's a

kind I thought it was mostly like that user experience Exactly.

Part of this, but it is pretty wild to think that this is kind determining the

way that people are coached in

the middle

of the German. You know, we're I didn't mean that a pejorative way,

but Yeah.

It's it's okay. We we are fortunate that we've got a great partner like the USTA,

like the Open that allows us to put this data together and give it to people.

And I think to build on what Sam's talking about, where it also comes in handy

is that night after

Uh-huh.

As they start thinking about who are they playing next. If you win, who are you

playing next? Can you go back in and look at how somebody played before? How did

they do in that match? What were those key moments? How was their serve quality? So

you can start thinking about that and get it in a much more concise fashion. Because

as Sam said, the players have a a tight focus of time. But if you think

about the fans who are also watching, they're really focused, and they've got a bunch of

different competing things that once that match is over, they're off to looking at something else.

And they might step away in the middle of a match. How do you bring them

back up to date very quickly with things like match chat and with likelihood to win,

which I didn't talk about before, which we've had historically. But now this year, with every

point, the likelihood to win will change. So it's a more much more dynamic versus just

saying at the beginning of a match, so and so is gonna have a 82% ranking.

Whatever.

Yep. Yep.

It's kind of question kind of for both of you, but, Sam, I'll start with you.

What is the best part about being at the US Open, playing at the US Open?

Like, what makes it kind of a singular event?

It's those nighttime matches. US Open's known for the night matches, especially sometimes when they trickle

into the the next day, I guess you would say. You know, it goes into twelve,

early, 1AM. People are are five, six, seven honeydeuces deep, and it has an atmosphere and

an electricity that is like no other tournament around the world. When you get to play

as a player in Arthur Ashe Stadium at night, it it feels like you're in a

a college football event in the South. It is just bigger than life. And so I

think if you were to ask the players where is the best tennis atmosphere in the

world, it's in New York. It's at the US Open, but particularly the night session there

on our Thresh Stadium.

Jonathan, we got about ninety seconds left.

I love the the excitement and the energy of the open. I've been fortunate. I've gone

to many of the grand slams, but that energy of the open is really unlike anything

else. I think you see it in a lot of different sports, and people just get

into it. And as Sam talked about, there are plenty of these matches deeper into the

tournament that go deep into the eve to the night, early morning hours. And the crowd

still is there, and they are engaging, and they love it. And the ability for us

to bring that to people, whether you're sitting there or you're watching from home or you

were there and then you left because you gotta get up for work the next morning,

the app is a new way. We take this we take this information to 14,000,000 people

around the world every year.