The road to the near future of tennis winds through the exclusive northern New Jersey borough of Alpine, to an unmarked drive where, behind formidable bi-parting gates, there lies a forty-million-dollar, forty-eight-acre wooded estate. The property—imposing homes, numerous outbuildings, a manmade lake, gardens and vistas—was assembled by Robert Zoellner and his wife, Victoria, who together founded Alpine Associates Advisors, a firm specializing in merger arbitrage. Zoellner, who died last year, had a clubman’s interest in tennis. It’s his son, Gordon A. Uehling III, who has transformed a hillside stretch of the property into a tennis-training facility that employs digital technology to gather data on every aspect of a player’s body, mind, and game, utilizing high-tech tools to improve that player’s performance. As he has done for several years, Novak Djokovic, the world’s top tennis player, has set up camp on the estate as he prepares for the U.S. Open, which begins on Monday. Uehling is a longtime friend and now an informal member of Djokovic’s backroom team. It was Uehling who introduced Djokovic to the CVAC hyperbaric chamber, an egg-shaped, World’s Fair-evoking pod in which you relax while simulated altitude pressure and a cyclical program of muscle compression work together to enhance your body’s ability to absorb oxygen. To Djokovic, Uehling is “Super G,” as he wrote on an autographed photo he gave Uehling. It hangs on the wall of one of two tennis clubs in suburban towns near Alpine where Uehling has expanded his academy, called CourtSense, and introduced his ideas about tennis and fitness.
Uehling is a mild-mannered, boyishly enthusiastic forty-two-year-old who tried to break into pro tennis after college, reaching the ranking of No. 925, in 2001. What he mostly took from his playing days, he says, is a deep inquisitiveness about how a player develops. He saw that, at the élite level, everyone had good technique and nearly everyone hit hard, but that some players—the best players—performed better: they held up and even thrived, physically and mentally, under the strains of a game that was growing increasingly athletic and, with longer rallies and points, stressful. He also recognized, as others are only now beginning to, that the sport was a tech-and-data laggard: its science-based breakthroughs were limited mostly to racquet and string materials; unlike baseball, it had no Bill James calculating analytics. At every level of the game, from young kids whacking green-dot, low-compression balls to world-class athletes training to reach the pro tour, development was all about the coach.
“Individual coaching will always be key,” Uehling said. “But technology—the right technology—can see things a coach can’t. It’s another set of eyes.” He went on, “Technology can gather data a coach can’t. That data will be there as evidence to help a coach show and convince a player to do this or change this. Actually, kids who’ve grown up with technology will demand that. And data can chart development over time: ‘Here’s what’s improving. Here’s what’s not.’ It’s there, in the numbers.”
Uehling’s Alpine camp has a green-clay Har-Tru court, a DecoTurf hard court, a red-clay court with the same crushed-brick surface as the Stade Roland Garros, in Paris, and a nearly completed grass court. But the show court is indoors, in a low-slung brick field house: a hard court outfitted with a camera-and-software system developed by PlaySight, a company whose engineers helped to create advanced flight-simulation systems for the Israeli Air Force. The PlaySight Smart Court, as it’s called, captures and logs video of every stroke a player hits and every move he or she makes. It can alert you, in real time, with a buzzer, if a shot is out, or if the ball has landed in a zone that a coach has instructed you to hit to. Ball speed, spin, and trajectory are recorded, as are point patterns, the distance run, and calories burned. All of this is made available instantly on a courtside touch-screen kiosk, where a coach and player can watch shots and points from a number of angles and pore over data. All of it is logged and can be crunched to chart tendencies and improvements over weeks and months. Coaches can see what players have learned and patterns in how they learn: through which methods, at what rate.
In recent years, Smart Courts have been installed on a number of campuses for college players, and the United States Tennis Association has added the system to its top-tier training facility in Flushing Meadows. But Uehling, who has the technology available at each of his sites, said that he’s particularly interested in seeing how seven- and eight-year-olds respond to it. “For kids growing up with video games, it’s another aspect of playing, of fun,” he told me. “And today kids learn visually.”
Of course, like anyone attempting to build a serious tennis academy in the years since Nick Bollettieri and Rick Macci established their respective camps in Florida a generation ago, Uehling also wants to attract stars and potential stars: they’re the proof of your approach (if they make it) and a boon to your branding (so that you make it, too). Uehling did not talk too much about his connection to Djokovic; the Serbian champion runs a very disciplined, tight-lipped team. He did mention that Christina McHale, a youngish American pro whose W.T.A. ranking has been as high as twenty-four, has trained at CourtSense. And, on the morning I visited, earlier this month, Matija Pecotic, who is making a run at a pro career (ranking: No. 287) after starring at Princeton, was hitting with a coach, redirecting balls hit to his (two-handed, lefty) backhand inside out, one of the game’s more difficult shots. “Has a world-class kick serve,” Uehling said, almost to himself, as we looked on. The backhands were landing wide, mostly. “Tennis training,” he said as we strolled away, “is working on what needs work.”
For players like Pecotic, Uehling and his team have gizmos for improvement that are not so much about how someone plays as who that player is and can become. There’s a software and biosensor program, developed by a Southern California-based company with the sci-fi-sounding name Neurotopia, that approaches your brain as a muscle that can be improved for competition. An athlete takes a psychological test, recognizing signals and pushing buttons, as sensors attached to his head measure such things as focus, reaction time, and how quickly he recovers from stress. The result is a brain “profile” of sorts, which, Neurotopia claims, can be improved by playing an intricate video game the company has developed. More down to earth is a treadmill machine called Optogait, which measures a player’s stride and movement patterns in a number of ways and can reveal problems with balance—which, Uehling noted, is the foundation of almost everything a player does on a tennis court.
I stretched on an elliptical machine, then mounted the Optogait under the watchful eyes of John Adamek, the CourtSense director of fitness, and Peter Gorman, a chiropractor who is best known for developing heart-rate-monitor technology, but who is now a movement specialist advising professional and Olympic sports teams on things like body symmetry and biomechanical efficiency. He’s one of Uehling’s gurus, and Optogait is an invention of a company he runs. I walked briskly for ten minutes, and the screen in front of me posted real-time measurements of my step length, step time, the “swing phase” of my hips, and more. I learned that my balance wasn’t bad for a man my age, but nowhere close to optimum. My left hamstring was tight, Gorman observed, and so was my right glute; that could throw things off. “Or maybe that bad headache you had years ago, when you were forty—maybe it was a mini-stroke,” he went on, with no discernable signs of concern. Learning to read and understand the data on the screen as I walked on the treadmill, I could, over time, adjust my gait, teach my body to move more symmetrically, become better balanced—and, by doing so, increase my power. That’s what the high-performance players were doing.
My gait issues revealed, Uehling drove me in his Tesla to neighboring Creskill, where we ate lunch in a bagel shop. He told me about a set of goggles he’d gotten his hands on that charted electronically, and in detail, the wearer’s shifting gaze. He’d had John McEnroe return serves while wearing them, he said, and learned that he does not simply watch the ball being tossed by the server (standard tennis instruction) but scans the server up and down for clues that might reveal where the serve is meant to go, and then, based on this intelligence, begins leaning left or right—Uehling got up from his seat and demonstrated this—as he’s landing from his preparatory split step. Back in his chair, he enthused about two California researchers trying to “do Moneyball” for tennis. If I understood what Uehling was saying, these researchers are studying not players’ individual shots but sequences and patterns in players’ games, when in a match and after which two or three previous shots a player is likely to, say, go for a down-the-line winner, or regularly miss.
“Why wouldn’t you want to know that if you could?” Uehling said. “If you were playing this guy?” He paused, then added, “Why wouldn’t you want to know everything you could know? Everything about yourself as a player? Who am I? That’s what I would say we’re up to.”
