Hi and welcome to the Essential Tennis Podcast, your place for free, expert, tennis instruction that can truly help you improve your game. Welcome to episode number 333 of the Essential
Tennis Podcast. Today I have a special guest and we're going to talk about the solution to bad line calls and tennis and not only is the technology that he's working on the solution to bad line calls, but also goes a tremendously long ways towards making instruction and drilling and practice and training and development much more effective and much more objective and much more measurable. And I love it when people take technology and tennis and mix it
together and that's exactly what we have with today's guest. And two quick things before we get to the interview number one, this is a sponsored episode by Acutenus and Adam is the CEO of Acutenus. And the only reason, this is thing number two, the only reason why I'm bringing him to you and letting you know about Acutenus is because I believe so strongly in what he's working on and what his team is working on. The technology they're putting
together is incredible and I'm just really excited. Anytime somebody starts to bring new solutions to the table using technology and helping tennis players improve faster. So without further ado, here's my interview with Adam Cher. With me on the show today is CEO of Acutenus, Adam Cher. Thank you so much for being on the show. Thanks Ian. I'm excited to be here and we had a great time when you came out a few weeks ago. It's great to talk to you again. Yeah, I really appreciate the invitation to
have us come out. We enjoyed ourselves very much and it was really cool to get a chance to kind of test drive the Acutenus system a little bit. For people at home listening right now, give us a 30,000 foot view. What is Acutenus and why is it important for amateur
athletes and coaches alike? Sure. Acutenus is a camera system that you install on a court and it gives you real-time feedback through LED displays and speakers that are positioned on the court for anything you might want to do, whether it's inventing a game, going through a deliberate set of drills or officiating a match. It's fun for all levels and we particularly are focused on the casual and club player because that's where most of Penis happens and
also we think we can have the biggest impact. The way we do that is trying to maximize the value and the engagement while the players are on the court through live feedback. Awesome. Throughout the 21st century, it seems like integration of technology and everything has just been the way the whole world has moved. It's gone to smartphones and smart TVs and smart refrigerators. I feel like this is just kind of the natural evolution of that
in creating a smart tennis court. Was that kind of your vision from the outset or what was that really drove you to create this technology? It's been an evolution. I have two partners Dave Clevon and Andy Hapsdap and they're really the technical brains engineers behind this. Dave and myself are tennis players but Dave has a son who actually has a future
in tennis and the rest of us are kind of never was as. Dave's son is a competitive junior player and as many people know there's a lot of lessons and travel internment that play involved. If you're really trying to optimize that, you need a way of objectively measuring the training and then analyzing it and then incorporating that feedback into your training. What that involves, involves dead and for the most part is what many people still do is
manual tracking. Either documenting an expel feeder on a piece of paper, my partner would track his son's matches or practices or pay the coach to do it. You can imagine that tedious time consuming, inefficient and if you're having the coach do it very expensive. Being a engineer he thought there's got to be a better way and so he went about building
a prototype to automate tracking and analysis. What came out of that inadvertently is that you could put on a display and speakers and actually get feedback for what's going on in real time. You can create a drill and see how successful you are at doing it. It turns out that this has been where different players of age groups and skill levels as well as the coaches responded to. It's important that the system is accurate and provides the
correct tracking and analysis. For most people they pay attention to what the coach says on the court or what's going on with tennis while they're on the court. When they're off the court they have other things to focus on and their lives. Yeah. Really the main reason why I thought this would be an absolute perfect fit for my podcast audience to hear about is the instant feedback along with the tracking and the
historical data aspect of it. The listeners of this show are super passionate about leading their own improvement journey, learning how they can take that next step forward. When I was there with you on the court and we did a couple of drills together. One was a ground stroke drill where the system was measuring our depth and the other one was a serve drill where we were trying to hit different targets with our serve both individually and then
sequentially across the service boxes. That's the kind of thing that as you mentioned typically an amateur athlete has to rely on a coach to facilitate those types of experiences and has to rely on a coach to give them the feedback of whether they're doing a good job or there's room for improvement. I think the whole idea of having this rich data set of how did I do today? Where can I improve? Where are my opportunities without even
needing a coach or supplementing a coach? I think it was really exciting to me and would be exciting to all my listeners as well. Can you give us a few examples of how that works
in real life with Accutennis? Yeah, so one, the primary example for self-directed learning is that we have pre-made curriculum that's available to the clubs where Accutennis is installed at and it's developed by teaching pros who focus on different things from pre-tennis ages 4 to 8 to people who are old enough across all age levels and across skill levels to improve. It's structured to similar to how other online and classroom-based learning
is done. You have a multiple week package of sessions with outcomes. The outcome may be for a 3-0 club player is to get more depth on the ball. Over the next six weeks or so, these drills will take you through how to accomplish that. Where I think it's a nice compliment to what you do is that there's two components. One thing you do such a great job of focusing on is the production of the stroke. One thing, Accutennis really focuses
on is then the second part of that is how the outcome is measured. By addressing both of those, the players can really get a good sense of how to strike the ball. I think you just had a video come out where you're talking about to not be a slave to a particular technique in that at the end of the day, you're looking to accomplish something usually when the point. In Accutennis, we help you focus on outcomes and stay engaged that way.
Let's talk about that kind of outcome tracking. What kind of data specifically is Accutennis going to give me? Is it where the ball is landing or speed or spin? What kind of information are we able to track in real time on an Accutennis court? Ball location is the primary source of feedback. That's for most people sufficient. As you know, you're trying to minimize the things you're paying attention to and thinking about
so you can focus on one thing and get better. Primarily, ball location is a big source of feedback. In addition to that, you can quickly look at other aspects of your shots such as a video replay and speed as well and also spin speed and net clearance. Awesome. How do those fit in? Can you give us an example of different curriculum or programs that can help develop different parts of the game? Can you maybe give us one example of that having to do with a specific part of a player's skill set?
One, obviously, consistency, I think all of us feel that can improve. You can start with a basic consistency drill. You and a partner, our goal is to hit 50 balls in a row in a five minute time period. You'll see your average shot speed in depth and at first, you're just trying to do it. You may play with more margin of error. The second iteration of that may challenge you to achieve that in three minutes. Another iteration may challenge
you to achieve that in only balls that go past a certain part of the court. The service line, for example, count. Then you can add all of those things together. You start with one is just accomplishing hitting the ball over the net many times in a row. Then it works in doing that more efficiently, which is sooner and doing it more accurately, which is
doing parts of the court. Awesome. Then one of the things that really kind of made my brain click, and I felt like there just be a tremendous value there, was when we took a break for lunch, went upstairs, and then you opened, I think you just had an
iPad or one of us had a laptop, I can't remember which, but we logged in really quick, took a look at my profile and all the data from the drills that we did and the points that we played and everything was all there already along with clips of individual shots and
points. Number one, the fact that it was just all there immediately blew me away, but number two, it made me realize, wow, if I had weeks or months or years of developmental tracking with that kind of detail, I feel like it would be super powerful for just to arm the everyday player with information about how they're progressing or whether or not progressing. How, you talked to us a little bit about that side of it, the kind of the
member portal and the access to the data? Yes. So everything you're doing has to be tracked, otherwise we're not able to give you feedback. So the system is watching where you're moving onto the court and where the balls are going and it's recording it, slicing it into shot clips and then annotating what you did. So in near real time, all that is synchronized
to the player's profile and is made immediately accessible. And so what's nice is it creates a way of tracking your progress in and I think most importantly creating a bit of accountability. I think when you're in the lesson and I still take lessons, it is often frustrating while you're there to really feel the progress while you're in the lesson and even over
multiple weeks. But by having this tracked and sorted and easily readily presented, you can see the objective measurement that you are in fact improving, whether it's you're able to serve more precisely and that can be reflected by the average time to complete a drill goes down or that you've progressed and you're in week 10 or 11 and the things you're doing that week are you wouldn't have been able to even complete the drill at the
end of the first week. So I think that's something that gets lost in the lesson that the coach kind of levels you up and it's a little bit unspoken and implied. And so everything seems challenging but in fact if you went back and did what you did in week one, it would seem foolishly easy. So to having it presented in this way with your progress is a good reminder that you are in fact getting better and can be fun to look at that too.
Yeah, I love the word accountability there Adam. I think it's really easy speaking as a player and then also as a coach somebody who spent a tremendous amount of time on the court trying to help other players get better. I think it's really easy to kind of go through the motions sometimes and sure you're hitting a lot of balls and you're working hard but when there's no specificity about you know what is the outcome we're actually trying to
achieve here. It's easy sometimes for players I think especially in a club setting to kind of fall into a little bit of a rut of just kind of doing the same thing day after day. And without any of that data, without any of that objective feedback it's hard sometimes to really tell like am I moving in the right direction. So is that kind of resonate with you and how do you kind of view that within the the acuteness way of experiencing the game?
Yeah, it absolutely does and there's there's two concepts that we try to weave into this to help create something that's enjoyable and more effective. One is changing it up and I think I've read the most about this in the in the weightlifting community that if you do the same circuit of exercises you get good at that and you feel accomplished but then
you adapt to it and you set a plateau for yourself. So I think in tennis if you're just used to going on autopilot and you have your warm up and you hit up the middle and then the pro comes to the net or the pro brings you to the net and as feeding you volley and then you do overheads and then you end you know with some practice serves against the pro you know you're sweating and your work hard and you're tired but your body adapts
to that and you have to mix it up. Yeah or you or you do plateau. In the second part of that which ties into it is creating deliberate practice and and that's where having more of a structure around the training over multiple weeks really fits in. So it it forces you to pay more attention to what you're doing in your hour lesson and then because it's being tracked you're able to see over that multi week period you know how that progression
actually goes. So if you met through the outcomes you were hoping for at the beginning. Awesome. I just I really appreciate and love the fact that you guys are thinking that deeply and that detailed about it and it's not just some gizmo or fancy technology you know do dad that you know sure it's cool that it calls the lines and tells you where the
shots are landing and all that kind of stuff but the the thought and intention behind the actual development of a player I think is something that really makes you guys unique and a big reason why I was excited to work with you guys and and so I think that part
of it is really fantastic. Can you can you talk a little bit about the the curriculum side of things when we were speaking I know you were talking about how you're vetting and really choosing where the lessons and the plans are are coming from what how have you gone about
that that process. So we have sort of in our staff someone who's a PTR and US PTA coach and she's gone a lot of development across age groups and skill levels and so we we work with her to develop different packages and then that's sort of the baseline of what any
one you know with acuteness can access and then above that we have a partnership with Judy Murray and her MISHIT program to get girls into tennis and it's it's a pre tennis program at Spanish six to twelve weeks that you get on court and off court training and
so we're adapting that to be also delivered through acuteness so it's really working with coaches who spent a lot of time and focus a lot of their energies on on figuring out how to engage and get people sort of sucked into the game and bring progress every time they're
on the court. So that's and then there's other we continue to find other people whose focus is coaching and we want to work with them to offer you know their approach to tennis that's been successful through our system and try to democratize that.
Awesome I love it I love that you guys are taking that seriously. Let's shift years a little bit and talk about the the match scoring side of things because I know that's another and from my understanding your first kind of most important focus is really on the the drills and the player development side of things but another huge feature of this system is is match play and I know you're working hard to get it approved for for sanctioned
competition. Can you tell us a little bit about how it works to to help players have a better experience within matches. Yeah so I think anyone who's played match plays experience bad line calls whether it's malicious or not. What's nobody makes bad line calls.
Yeah not right you must be in a better league than I am. So so what so there's a yeah there's a couple things and I actually play a lot of competitive tennis still and I find the most I actually often forget where we are in the match and and it's something it's usually in every match I play so when asked what the score is whether it's the game score
the set score. I actually think the best use of automated line calling is just so you don't have to think about it and then second second early to that and this is probably a bigger issue at the junior and collegiate level is is creating objective line calling because I do know that's an issue and I read that there's a huge attrition of junior players
after they play their first tournament and line calling is a big reason for that. So if we can do something that gets approved by the USDA and ITF and ITA that can help bring more objectivity to that aspect of the sport that is going to be a big boom and it's it's basically like a default feature of our system because in order to provide the accurate and reliable information and games and training like that match level case ability and accuracy
has to be there. Yeah and you and I played some point play we played a couple of time breakers we did a little bit of set play and the way you described it and good playing by the way the way you described it on the court I think was a perfect way
of encapsulating it and that was you said it's kind of like having a chair umpire or maybe it was you said it's like playing on center court and you have a chair umpire and I instantly kind of had that experience of realizing that I didn't have to focus so hard anymore on everything I didn't I didn't have to keep track of the points I didn't have to keep track of the line calls it was kind of a weird sensation to realize that I
could just focus on just hitting good tennis shots does that makes sense? Yeah it makes a lot of sense and it's actually I think uh an advantage you don't realize sort of the higher level players have is is even keeping track of score um and knowing you have to pay
really close attention to a line call is mentally taxing and when you're making quick decisions under stress you the amount of processing you do is is precious and if you're losing capacity to call it like administrative tennis task like score keeping and line calls that reduces your capacity to being the moment and and focus on you know the other the things you really need to be doing so if you can take that away yeah I do think it's freeing.
Yeah I experienced that it was actually really unique I've never I've never played a match that was important enough that that there was a chair umpire so it was it was a new feeling for me and I totally felt a like a weight lifted off mentally and now that you're you're describing it I it something random just connected in my head are you familiar with the concept
of decision fatigue Adam? Yeah so yeah that totally makes sense to me from like a mental taxing basically the the gist of that concept for everybody listening is researchers have suggested that we only have a certain amount of cognitive energy per day when it comes
to making choices and and you can either use it up very very quickly or you can kind of spread it out and be a little bit more conscious about how you use that it's a it's a limited resource and you know it's not something where we can just make unlimited good decisions
uh any given you know time period so it seems to me that if that stands true within a tennis environment think about all the decisions we're having to make between like you're saying the the focusing on the line calls deciding if I'm going to call this in or out making
the decision about tactics and patterns and maybe changing your strategy up based on the point scenario in the game scenario yeah all that I think you used the word precious it's that bandwidth I mean all bandwidth is is critical isn't it?
It is and in in the lesson setting you guys made like a great parody video that is really hits the nail on the head with the coach who's feeding balls and just at a million miles an hour delivering a hundred different suggestions of improvement and that really hits the
nail on the head on sort of providing too much information and giving players like more than they can handle and take action on because you only you know if you hit a shot you have a second to do things and you need to prepare yourself to do it and you may be able
to focus on one thing probably not more than that so if you're distracted with other other things whether your coach gave you five things to focus on it's your your legs in your racket position and where your eyes are and then and you're adding where the ball is
in terms of in or out it's you you're never even going to get to producing the right shot absolutely so talk to us a little bit about the technology at them because it all at you know at this point everybody who's listening this all sounds fantastic and and
of course it would be great to have an automated you know basically artificial intelligence like guiding us through our lessons and our our training sessions on the courts and our matches and our competition it sounds like it probably costs tens or hundreds of thousands
of dollars what's what what is made up of the technology on the on the hardware side of things and the software side of things and what what does this cost a player or a facility to be able to actually install yep that's important so we sell it to facilities unless you're
a lucky enough person to have your own private court and we'd be happy to sell it to you and if you have a single if you want to have it on a single court it's it's 500 a court and then if you buy multiple ones per month it's it's less than that and so five hundred
is is monthly right it's a subscription correct correct and then there's a smaller there's a small implementation fee because we provide a lot of support leading up to the the installation and go live of the product and we think that's a it's an affordable price
point and the way we arrived at that is consulting with a lot of tennis directors and club owners about how they run their operations in their mix of of player types from the from the mature doubles leagues to the you know the junior clinics and and private lessons and everything
in between and so it's at those price points the clubs felt they would be possible on each court they have it on because at the end of the day it's you know running a club or a program or operating as a product as a you know independent teaching pro it's very
hard and there's a lot of cost associated with it between equipment and facilities and court time and we're hiring other pros and so to just add another cost to that we didn't think was feasible so we had to create a product that could be sold at a price point that
would be able to be upsold at a profit for the pros and the clubs otherwise it just wasn't going to work like their businesses are hard enough and something you told me when we were spending time together in Pennsylvania that I think is really critical and something that
again I just was really impressed by the thoughtfulness behind it is you told me your goal from the start was to make it a profitable thing for clubs in other words you know you don't view this as just another expense for the facility but if you used properly you actually
see this as a net gain for a club or facility financially is that right and how do you see that actually point out yes that's yeah so going back to pricing and the other key is utilization is that there's not every as you know not every court hour can be
of the right type of person that is sort of maximally beneficial to use it so you know we've set this up so that if you're using it basically 30% of the time a club could generate a you know 50% or more gross profit per court so that that's how we think of
that's how we tried to position it so acknowledging the reality of running a club and you have you know not everyone is potentially eligible even though we'd like to get there as a good user of acutennis and also you have the reality of operation you've got you know people
who've played doubles on the court every morning for the last 10 years and if you can't just shuffle everyone around so just because the court's available 12 hours a day doesn't mean it's available 12 hours a day sure awesome and what about on the the hardware side
of things I think it'd be easy for people to imagine a bunch of like big old school security camera style and closures like all around the court pointing pointing towards the court what a the hardware side of things what does that look like and do individuals or clubs
have to pay for the the hardware as well no it's it's a lease because we want to continue to improve the product and provide the support and deliver improvements when they get there so we're not forcing clubs to purchase a bunch of hardware that then becomes unusable
just sort of a lot of cost at the end and we we work with we use low cost cameras that are very small and our intellectual property which is that which is basically that it is our patent it allows us to take lower very low cost cameras and apply our technique
to it to get very high frame rates to get the accuracy needed to make the system usable so that's how we've controlled costs and hopefully as you didn't notice that everything is that's installed around the court was housed in enclosures that match the surrounding
yeah we're trying to also make this unobtrusive so such your audience there's actually 22 cameras that we employ which sounds like a like so many that there wouldn't even be room for players on the court but again but again the cameras are are barely bigger than the size
of the camera on your phone and there are most of them are contained in the metal enclosures that are mounted to each half of the net posts so there's four net posts mounted enclosures that have 16 of the cameras and their thin rectangles painted the color of the net post
and then behind each baseline are three cameras mounted sort of above the you know above the curtain and again in enclosures that match the back wall that give you and those can't and then and so those basically all blend in and the only thing we hope you see is the led display that's two sided that's about six inches tall by 18 inches wide that's it's above the net post and gives you the visual feedback yeah I honestly and I listen I've been in media and you know I'm just kind of a tech gear
nerd anyway but I'm pretty attuned to technology and how it's being implemented and used around me I honestly at first didn't realize where everything was I figured it out I mean I was you know I was walking on the court looking for because I knew obviously
why I was there but if had I not known why I was there and that it was a special court I honestly may not have realized what was was going on around that court you you guys have done a really nice job of making it's not distracting and unobtrusive thank you that
was our intention is not everyone's comfortable necessarily totally in front of a camera so if you keep them focused on the pro in the in the feedback aspect you know they're more engaged and present and in the moment than looking at a bunch of yeah large security cams there
are some things that that look like they're from 2001 space Odyssey yeah there is there is nothing that looked like a camera anywhere on the court and so it almost kind of made it feel like a magical thing to look at the tablet and see an instant replay of the
serve or the forehand that I just hit it was a really cool experience yeah that's good and in the other important aspect of the hardware is that the units are self contained on the court meaning the application exists locally so you're not relying on the internet to
use the Y feedback system when you're at the club and I in that's now it is connected to the internet because that's how you're able to see on your player profile later the different video clips and stats but many clubs given the type of structure that tennis
clubs are made out of and that they're geographically a larger footprint have trouble with internet connectivity around the court and so rather than fight that or ask clubs to make up front cap X cap of expenditures we can just work create this self contained system that as long
as there's power to the facility that this system can work we felt that was really really important yeah not only that but it just made it incredibly fast the fact that it was self contained and everything was just working on a local network instead of
having to connect to the internet and then kind of redirect the data back to the tablet I was kind of shocked at first at how immediate the video clips were available on the tablet so that's a huge benefit to it as well I think yeah I think there's a couple of key
pieces that will keep someone like a coach in particular using it and speed is you know up there like number one or two because I think you know parents of juniors or adults taking lessons are pretty sensitive to the when how time is being spent and if me is
the player taking a lesson with you I just want to chat you up and that's why I want to use my hour 90 minutes or whatever that's fine but if I see you fiddling around with your phone or tablet and I'm not hitting balls so you're wasting my time so you know
we think like log in the coach logging in to using the drill with the player you know it needs to happen in under 10 seconds and we've and we've managed to do that in four taps and then switching drill has to be equally as fast so it's again we're really trying
to focus on keeping the player hitting balls and getting feedback and not like messing around with technology and it's really wanted to be seamless and if we can do that which so far we have you know that makes it more likely for coaches to adopt it because if you
don't it also feels like you know maybe there's other setup in in homework or unpaid time that the coach has to spend to get the speed up and if that's the case you know that's a pretty big ask you know and coaches are very you know sensitive to being asked to do a bunch of unpaid work and so we try to please minimize that.
Absolutely well congrats Adam on everything you've accomplished already and I can't wait to hear how the the big launch goes wet when is acutennis officially available and by the way everybody listening you need to go check it out more details and a lot of video clips and examples are at acutennis.com that's ACC you and then tennis TEN and I S dot com what when are you guys actually starting to make your first installations.
Our first scheduled installations are the week of January 13th and we have and until then we have some live courts that have been generous in piloting us that we're happy to host you at you know specifically um Doyle Town tennis club where you are at so if anyone's in the middle states mid-Atlantic regions and we're happy to have you win for the afternoon.
Awesome very kind of you is there anything that we have not talked about that we haven't touched on that you think is really important for our listeners to know about.
I think for the listeners that are taking lessons or who may also do some coaching the the I want to focus on again making this focused on the court experience and with with setting up drills and and providing curriculum you know we do all that for you ahead of time and I think that's a big important thing that makes using it a lot more quickly.
So to have so to only need to log in and have access to their drills that are relevant to the skill level of the player you're teaching is a big time saver and makes it much easier to just get into the flow of using the system.
And also I want to point out coach that we discussed this briefly when I when we were together coaches can also fill in they don't have to use the pre loaded curriculum correct they can they can fill in their own drills and their own sequences of shots and that's sort of thing.
Yeah so we do that for you so as part of setting the system up we go to the facility and sit down with the coaches and go through how they teach different players and and then we program in to the system so when it comes time to go through the part of the training
with them and hosting clinics at their club where it's actually live with the coaches and other players they can just log in and go and even with the log in we made it as easy as possible so on the court it's just a phone number and that's it. So we're really can't emphasize enough how fast we're trying to make this for the players and the coaches. Awesome. Anything else Adam that that we haven't touched on?
No but looking forward to having you back in the facility area soon so we'll figure that out. Absolutely yeah I had a really good time exploring all the different features and and just playing around with the with the system as I told you when when I was out there with you I just I really have a passion for anything that's converging together technology and and tennis
I think the game in general has kind of been behind when it comes to adopting different different forms of technology video analysis being one of them so I love to see people like you working on making a holistic kind of solution to having more I love the word accountability more data more specificity and guidance and objectivity on the court.
So really respect and and really admire what you guys are doing with Accu tennis Adam I wish you guys all the best and looking forward to seeing how you guys do as you as you launch in January. Sounds good thanks for your time. Well I love the conversation. Yeah likewise so again everybody go to Accu tennis.com check it out and if anybody has any questions Adam what's the what's the best way to get in touch with you?
You can call me and you can include my phone number in the notes or send me an email at adam at accu tennis.com. Awesome thank you Adam. Thank you. For more free game improving instruction be sure to check out essential tennis.com where you'll find hundreds of video audio and written lessons. Also be sure to subscribe to essential tennis on iTunes and YouTube where we are the number one resource in the world providing passionate instruction for passionate tennis players.
Thank you so much for listening today. Take care and good luck with your tennis.