Week 43, 2024

This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Innovation in Sport.

We’ve got a one-week Masters 1000 for old time's sake. Here’s what we found interesting this week:

• WTA Finalists Categorical Rankings

  More: We loved this segment on TC Live. Mark Petchey, Paul Annacone and Coco Vandeweghe jam on the year-end WTA top-8, ranking them by serve, offense, defense, and variety.

• YouTuber ‘tennis Brothers’ Plays & Chats With Lorenzo Musetti

  Why It’s Interesting: Felix Mischker is known for broadcasting his journey to one ATP point. Here, he gets to hit with world #16 Lorenzo Musetti. Elite matchplay content.

• Sinner Still Looking For More

  His Current Setup: This video from TennComm dives into it.

  Our Read: Sure, it might seem insane for Jannik Sinner to do this on the back-end of a year he ascended to No. 1, but isn’t this move in line with how he’s gone about his career up to this point? He didn’t need to fire Ricardo Piatti and he didn’t need to overhaul his serve technique.

• In Other Sinner News…

  Why It’s Interesting: Jannik offered his most expansive comments to date on what it was like playing before and after the anti-doping decision went public. He also discusses his approach in tiebreaks and what he expects in 2025. Translated from Italian by Elliot Kaye.

• A Common Sense Solution on Tennis Balls is Coming

  Why It’s Interesting: You’ve probably heard that professional players are fed up with changing tennis balls every week. Stuart Miller spoke with ATP officials and reports a change is in the works. The ATP has set a goal of standardizing the balls across the “swings” by 2029.

• Matteo Berrettini Will Begin Coaching Search This Offseason

  Why It’s Interesting: Francisco Roig was Uncle Toni’s right hand man for the majority of Rafael Nadal’s career. Berrettini brought him in after splitting with “father figure” and childhood coach Vincenzo Santopadre. Gill started this week’s Mailbag by discussing the state of the Italian’s career.

• Maria Sharapova And The Bryan Brothers Learn They’re Hall-of-Famers

On Monday Match Analysis, Gill reacts to first-time ATP 500 titleists in Basel and Vienna, Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard and Jack Draper. Perricard did not get broken in the final against Ben Shelton, or against any of his opponents for that matter. We'll discuss what makes the Frenchman special as a server and compare him to players of the past. Draper took out Karen Khachanov in straights with a terrific display of serve and forehand dominance, composure and versatility.

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Hey everyone, Gill Gross here. While I’m grateful for any amount of success I’ve had talking tennis on the internet for the past half decade, I believe we should all be doing better in this sport as creators and as fans. The tennis content economy is far behind other sports by metrics of engagement and popularity. This newsletter is our effort to DRAW the great things we find in tennis every week- we search for content that teaches us, makes us think, makes us laugh and ultimately makes loving this sport the best possible experience. Our vision is to speed up the growth of a robust content economy in tennis, for the benefit of fans, players and creators alike.

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