Okay, so check it out, I decided to dive into some tennis data, specifically focusing on Venus Williams’ performance at the Atlanta Open. Why? Well, I was just browsing some sports stats and her name popped up, figured, why not?
First thing I did was hit up the usual spots for tennis data – you know, those sites that have match results, player stats, all that jazz. Scraped whatever I could find related to her appearance at the Atlanta Open. Man, getting that data into a usable format was a pain. Lots of cleaning and formatting, you wouldn’t believe it.
Then came the fun part – kinda. Started digging into her match results. Looked at things like her serve stats, how many aces she had, double faults (ouch!), first serve percentage, all that. Also checked out her return game – how well she was breaking serve, her performance on receiving points, that sort of thing.
Honestly, the numbers themselves weren’t super groundbreaking. But I was more interested in visualizing the data. I whipped up some charts and graphs using Python and Matplotlib. Nothing fancy, just some simple bar charts showing her serve and return stats, maybe a line graph showing her performance over the course of the tournament.
- Serve Stats: Aces, Double Faults, 1st Serve %, 2nd Serve Win %
- Return Stats: Break Points Won, Return Points Won
- Match Results: Wins, Losses, Opponents
One thing that kinda stood out was how much her performance varied match to match. Some days she’d be serving bombs, other days she’d be struggling with double faults. Same with her return game – sometimes she’d be breaking serve left and right, other times she couldn’t buy a break point.
I even tried to compare her stats from the Atlanta Open to her overall career stats, just to see if there were any noticeable differences. Didn’t find anything earth-shattering, but it was still interesting to see how her performance in that particular tournament stacked up against her career averages.
All in all, it was a pretty cool little data project. Didn’t uncover any major insights or anything, but it was a good way to practice my data analysis skills and learn a bit more about Venus Williams’ tennis game. Plus, I got to play around with some cool data visualization tools, which is always a win.
Would I do it again? Probably. Maybe next time I’ll focus on a different player or a different tournament. But yeah, it was a fun little experiment.
