Amateur tennis players love data as much as the pros. The race to monetize it is on
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A record 27.3million people picked up a racket at least once last year, up by 1.6m from 2024, representing a growth of 54 per cent since 2019, according to a news release issued by the United States Tennis Association (USTA) last week. That’s nearly 10m more players over what has been six consecutive years of growth. “Core players”, defined as individuals who played 10 or more times throughout the year, increased by 1.5m to 14.5m in 2025.
And with more players, comes more data. Companies are queuing up to be the Strava of tennis — offering amateur players the chance to share data and footage of themselves and have the kind of social element that Strava has facilitated, principally for runners and cyclists, since its founding in 2009.
Strava does have a tennis offering, where players can track their cardio performance and record results, but it doesn’t offer the kind of in-depth stroke and performance analysis offered by other racket-sport-specific apps. There are plans to bolster the tennis offering with match tracking to supplement the existing GPS data, a representative told The Athletic via email — adding that tennis data is the most uploaded of their six racket sports available.
It can feel like every month a new player is entering the market, promising to help tennis players reach their full potential. In November, the eight-time Grand Slam champion Andre Agassi announced a multi-year partnership with IBM for a new digital platform for tennis, pickleball and padel that, according to a company spokesperson, “uses AI to analyze everyday video footage and deliver professional-grade coaching directly to players’ phones.”
Other big players in the market include Zenniz, which offers “real-time performance tracking, electronic line calling, and immersive video.” Baseline Vision, based in Israel, claims to do something similar. PlaySight, which provides “all-in-one multi-angle video platform for broadcast, replay (VAR), coaching, and automated highlights”, was an early mover in the space.
The market leader, though, is generally considered to be SwingVision, which has around 500,000 users (of those this year, 90 per cent have used the tennis offering, the remainder is almost all for pickleball, with a small amount doing so for padel, which only just launched and hasn’t yet been actively promoted). It has around 25,000 paying subscribers, with rates starting at $180 a year, giving users 30 hours of film footage per month, and unlimited AI video trimming, match highlights, shot stats, heatmaps, and line calling.
It was founded by AI experts from Apple and Tesla and its app launched in 2019, with the aim of bringing “the Wimbledon Centre Court experience to all athletes, using just your phone”, as CEO and co-founder Swupnil Sahai put it on LinkedIn. Its investors include 2003 U.S. Open champion Andy Roddick, former world No. 4 James Blake and Tennis Australia. The U.S. accounts for around 45 per cent of its monthly active users, with China and the United Kingdom (both eight per cent) the next biggest.
The tech-savvy amateur tennis market is considerable, with 193,000 regular weekly visitors to the r/10s Reddit page, which describes itself as “a Bunch of Tips for Beginners and Intermediates.” SwingVision has its own Reddit page, where users share footage of themselves using the app (complete with score bugs as if watching a professional match, and the speed of each shot shown on screen).
“The market is sizable,” says head of business development Nikhil Jayashankar. “This is a multi-billion dollar opportunity, in just tennis and pickleball alone. If we’re able to capture even 10 to 20 per cent of that market, we’ll put ourselves in a really good position.”
Jayashankar, who previously worked for the technology consultancy giant Accenture but has been with the company since soon after it was founded 11 years ago, says that during their last round of investment in 2023, SwingVision raised funds at a $32.5million valuation. He thinks that would be north of $50m now. The target is to have a million users.
Jayashankar, himself an NCAA Division I player for University of California, Berkeley, still plays with friends and likes to review his serving stats (serve analysis is a particularly popular function, as it’s a static shot and can be worked on like a golf swing).
There’s a free SwingVision app with fewer recording hours, storage and more basic analysis, and users are encouraged to mount their device on the back of the court with a Swing Stick, costing around $50. They can then record matches, with video cutting out the dead time so a two-hour match can be instantly cut to around 20 minutes. Videos are tagged automatically, which in the paid tiers includes advanced data like all the forehand returns they missed into the net. Other features include heat maps of shot placement broken out by stroke type and hitting position, and where you are missing the ball most frequently.
A new feature called AI Swing Coach essentially tracks a player’s best and worst patterns of play. If, as Jayashankar says, Strava can help deliver a training programme for the New York marathon, the aim of SwingVision is to enable a user to “beat (a certain) player in the next few months”.
The social element of Strava — sharing data and interacting with friends — has been key to its success, and that’s what tennis wants to tap into. “We have different leaderboards of how you stack up versus your friends or peers or the overall SwingVision community — who hit the most shots in a given month, who hit the fastest serve,” Jayashankar says. “So there’s a little bit of that community dynamic as well that is prevalent in Strava.”
He says this will also underpin the company’s pickleball offering, which was launched at the end of 2023, and its move into padel.
“Often it’s just seeing the highlights and sharing them with friends,” Jayashankar adds. “I use it to stay connected. I have a group chat of former college tennis friends and we’re all a little bit washed up, but it’s nice to be able to share a good point with them or on my Instagram. Making myself feel like I still got it a little bit.”
An extension of this is the content creators who use apps like SwingVision to bring the technology to a wider community. Mark Sansait, a former Division III college tennis player for the University of Wisconsin, is now in his mid-thirties and a senior software engineer at the American College of Surgeons. In his spare time, he runs a YouTube page which has almost 25,000 subscribers, and features videos like reviews of tennis academies, strings and equipment. Sansait is now sponsored by SwingVision and regularly uploads videos of himself in action, providing the kind of social element that the company wants to push.
“If there’s a really cool shot during the match, like a blazing down-the-line winner, I can highlight it and export it as vertical, which is the format that TikTok and YouTube shorts and Instagram Reels use, so it’s super easy,” he says.
It’s there, rather than on apps like SwingVision themselves, where footage can go viral and really reach the considerable amateur tennis community. Winston Du, one of the most popular YouTubers in this area, has 125,000 subscribers.
Jayashankar believes an important element to the technology’s growth is the extent to which coaches embrace this kind of technology.
“We’ve been behind the eight ball compared to team sports and even individual sports like golf with things like Trackman,” he says. “We’ve seen that mindset shift in the amateur tennis space. We’ve worked over time to convince people that this should be part of your player development regimen, being able to use video and track how you’re performing. Part of that is driven through the players but you’re seeing a lot of fresh blood amongst coaches that are adopting these types of new technology solutions as well.”
It’s coaches who are helping to promote SportAI, another player in this space. The Norwegian company was founded in late 2023 by tech and software industry experts, including CEO Lauren Pedersen, a former NCAA Division 1 player for American University, Washington, D.C. Although it is more of a business-to-business operation, primarily to training facilities, teams, broadcasters, retailers and equipment brands, it’s used by Øivind Sørvald, the long-time coach of world No. 13 and three-time Grand Slam finalist Casper Ruud.
Last summer, The Athletic was invited to try the technology at the grass courts at London’s Roehampton Club, where the Wimbledon qualifiers take place. Over the course of an hour’s hit, the company’s computer vision and machine learning technology analysed elements of my (middling amateur) game, from power generation to swing velocity, comparing them to professional benchmarks.
I was then shown videos of analysis of my forehand, backhand and serve, with graphics showing my biomechanics, swing, power and contact point. There are encouraging messages like “great power!” and “ideal sequence achieved,” even if the comparisons to the pros are sometimes sobering. The technology can also make recommendations on what racket to use based on swing, something that runners will be familiar with when picking what shoe to buy.
There are tips, too, like: “Ensure your hips initiate the movement to create more effective power transfer. Delay the shoulder rotation slightly to allow for a more explosive racket acceleration.” When it comes to the forehand, I’m told to “focus on a compact backswing. Ensure that you swing down and hit the ball with your wrist low, before moving upward for topspin. This will enhance your curve and consistency.”
“We want to help people so they know what it is they need to work on, to tell you it’s not everything that’s wrong,” says Sørvald, before my hit. That’s reassuring, I think, though he hasn’t yet seen me play.
“AI saves time,” Sørvald adds. “I use this with Casper if I need to know something and to convince him. We use everything to get the information across in the right way.”
The key, Sørvald and Pedersen say, is to have one thing to really focus on after each hit, and an app like this can show players what that should be. For me, it’s a kink in the serve and trying to have a longer take-back. Even leaving aside the specific instructions, just being able to watch oneself back is extremely valuable — and it’s easy to see why doing so becomes so addictive.
Whether that’s necessarily a good thing is open to question. A recent article in The Spectator was titled “I’m a Strava addict,” in which the author wrote: “If a man runs through a forest but doesn’t post it on Strava, it didn’t happen. I won’t believe it, anyway: the athletic tracker app is my new addiction.”
Many would empathise with that sentiment, and there is a sense among some cyclists and runners that the obsession with data tracking and sharing has taken away some of their love for the activity. In 2018, I interviewed an athlete who had run a marathon at an elite time of 2hr 25min but had then switched to taking on challenges that weren’t about the time, but about the joy of running. Like running the Tour de France route and completing 44 marathons in 44 different countries in 44 consecutive days.
Whether tennis amateurs will become overly data-obsessed or whether this is simply a healthy and effective use of modern technology will likely only become clearer over the next few years.
This idea of an interactive coach, meanwhile, also forms part of the Agassi/IBM collaboration, where you can ask questions that are answered by an AI coach voiced by Darren Cahill, Agassi’s former coach, who now works with four-time Grand Slam champion Jannik Sinner.
The app launch is scheduled for the fall, including features like swing analysis feedback, motivational challenges, progress tracking, and social sharing. It will initially be available for tennis, followed by pickleball and padel soon after. Like SwingVision and Sport AI, the aim of Agassi Sports Entertainment (ASE) is to encourage people to get out and play, and complement that experience. “We are developing new technology that makes racket sports more inclusive, more dynamic, and more impactful than ever before,” Agassi said in a news release at the time of the product announcement three months ago.
A fear here is that this technology could leave some coaches out of a job. Sansait points out that where previously coaches could add value by going through your matches and finding patterns, now AI can do that for you as long as you’re able to record the footage.
Others, like Sørvald and Rennae Stubbs, the four-time doubles Grand Slam champion and former coach of Serena Williams, Karolína Plíšková and Sam Stosur, see AI and data as more of a complement for coaches, rather than a means to replace them. Stubbs added in a phone interview this week that AI will not be able to provide the kind of emotional and psychological support that is such a key part of coaching — even at amateur level.
Jayashankar said that AI can help coaches by allowing them to offer things like “premium lesson packages with video and stats, remote coaching where a coach can see a player’s video and data and give them feedback remotely, plus off court in-person tactical sessions where they review video together on a computer or casting onto a TV.”
Elsewhere, another of the big offerings of apps like SwingVision that is changing the game for non-professionals is line calling, with incorrect calls — deliberate or otherwise — often the scourge of the amateur game.
The company wants to become the global officiating standard for amateur tennis, and is working with the International Tennis Federation (ITF) to gain their silver certification. They’ve also worked with the USTA to plot line calling for junior events, and collaborate with a number of American universities for college matches and Tennis Australia for video analysis and stats at their professional events.
That might all feel far removed to a lot of amateurs, but those with the $180-a-year pro subscription can challenge line calls directly through an Apple Watch or they can pair their playing partner’s phone to theirs to review line challenges on that device while their phone is recording.
With heavyweight players like ASE entering the market, the expectation is that amateur tennis’ digital revolution will only gather pace, especially with more and more people playing the sport.
Sansait thinks live streaming will be one of the next frontiers for amateur players — for SwingVision, this feature is mainly used by college teams and for events like the ITF World Tennis Masters Tour for veteran players and the Junior Orange Bowl. He wonders, too, whether there’ll ever be a true equivalent to what Strava is for running and cycling, because tennis will always be a sport about who can beat who on the day, rather than who can post the better numbers.
Either way, there have never been more amateurs playing, and there have never been more opportunities for them to feel like professionals.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
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