Weekly Roundup

I moved these two mentions from pre-Madrid post to group in with this new Weekly Roundup...
Get Rainer on ESPN.com, background and US Open pix
1) ESPN.com all year has neglected to put Rainer in their player listings page. I can understand if they thought it was a fluke early in the year, but come on, we know he's the real deal. And it's not just Schuettler who wasn't included - but there are also players on the list that shouldn't be or haven't even played all year! I emailed them after Rainer beat Agassi in the summer and got a positive response from them that it would 'be addressed', but no one ever updated the info. They need to update their list of players after January.
Fill out this form to contact them and suggest/demand they get this player who is 6th in the world on their list! ESPN is covering the Masters Cup in Houston and it would be in their best interest to get his name out there... that's what we're here for!

2) I updated/posted a draft from 10 September 03 that I was working on but forgot about... it has some background on me for all those who've been kind enough to write and ask about how this came about. It includes a sampling of some of my non-Rainer photos (2002 Olympics). I may add more of my photos in the future, but I'll always backdate them so just Schuettler info remains on the main page.

Also, my US Open photos are now on the site in their own separate entry in the September archives under 7 Sept to 13 Sept.

The real Weekly Roundup...
Wednesday 22 October

No real theme for this one, just some little things I found here and there that I thought were interesting:

• Today I am in a good mood, as I start this it is actually snowing - nothing sticking at all but still technically the first flakes of the year! It's been hot and cold the past week (was 65 F (18C) one day and then 34 F (1C) the next night) with even some scraping of the windshield in the mornings a must-do. I admit I had cocoa this week and the first fire in the fireplace as well... winter's coming! The Yankees also lost Game 4, so it can't be too bad of a night. I'm not a Marlins fan, but I certainly am not a Yankees fan.



• I came across this site, The Gender Genie that studies samples of your text and states whether the writer is male or female. The site says it's been 74% correct since September in the over 117,000 submissions. Of course, all the text samples I tried out all falsely said they were written by a male.



• Site Insight: Found a new place to get statistics for the site that was very reasonably priced and provides tons of information. The counter is up and running on the sidebar, it shows "unique" visitors to the site. Which of course isn't as simple as that... I think it boils down to if you click to the site, it's a unique visit. If you then surf elsewhere but came back to the site within about 20-30 minutes, you're still listed as that one unique click. But, come back later in the day, you get recounted. It also doesn't really keep track of reloads.
  New countries in the past two weeks are Finland, Mexico, Czech Republic and Australia. I believe Jordan will come up in the next few days, but that's because my sister will be in that country for some "R&R" from her time in Iraq. But we'll call her a Rainer fan anyways, besides she's the only one in the family that can speak German (I took the hablo Espanol route, which I could utilize only for a couple days in the TMS Madrid articles). She's been in Germany three times this year and she couldn't find any Schuettler info either!



• I think the Linux commercial that has Coach Wooden, M Ali, and other noted and famous people in their fields giving important tips to a quiet blonde boy is one of the best ever... never fails to completely grab my attention.



• On the "Houston-Watch" for the Masters Cup... here is the way they'll play:
  Format:
  Round robin format with 8 players divided into two groups of 4 players each, with 8 seeds to be determined by the ATP Champions Race standings on the Monday after the last ATP tournament of the calendar year. All matches shall be the best of three tie-break sets, except for the final, which shall be the best of five tie-break sets.
  Order of Play:
  The top seeded player will be placed in the Red Group and the second seeded player will be placed in the Gold Group. Players seeded 3 and 4, 5 and 6, 7 and 8, will then be drawn in pairs with the first drawn placed in the Red Group. Each player plays the three other players in his Group. The winner of each Group (best overall record) will be placed in separate semi-final brackets, with the top player in the Red Group playing the Runner-Up in the Gold Group, and vice versa. If two or more players are tied after the round robin matches, the ties will be broken as follows:1. Winner of match between the two players tied; 2. Player with the highest percentage of sets won; 3. Player with the highest percentage of games won.
  
  *On a personal note, I have three options for spectating Houston (my preference in this order)... one is in person and I am floating that one right now and that if it works, I'll certainly post my success. Basically I can get to Houston and stay there, but since the schedule isn't known, knowing my luck I'd end up with all the non-Rainer sessions. Good tennis is good tennis, which is obviously the perk of Houston, but it would suck to travel a couple thousand miles and not see one of Schuettler's matches. Tickets are selling out and I can't afford to buy both sessions for four or five days to cover my bases.
  The second is record all of it off ESPN and try to keep up-to-date watching it after work, and the third is to schedule my fourth (yes, fourth) allergy-related surgery for that week and get to miss work and watch it on TV as ESPN shows it live.



• As the World Cup season kicks off this weekend, bad news for Kjetil Andre Aamodt, who crashed in practice today in Austria. His season could already be over and the 2006 Olympic Games and his career are also in question. Aamodt won gold medals in the super giant slalom and combined events at the Salt Lake City Games, which I got to see in person. Earlier it was thought to involve knee ligament damage and broken leg bones, but a recent wire report stated that he broke his ankle and could be back in January, let's hope so.



• Tragic news from Indy today as Tony Renna was killed testing tires.



• Huge drug scandal news hitting not only the US but Europe as well. A previously undetectable steroid (THG) is now testable and all sorts of famous athletes are being subpoenaed and some are now failing drug tests. This could have a major impact on World Championships and the 2004 Athens Olympic Games. Here is an ESPN article on it.

I took a Sports Science class in college where the professor was also the university's Track and Field field coach. He cited a study done with elite high school, college and pro athletes - but first asked the students our response: "If you could take a drug that would guarantee you an Olympic gold medal, but you would die within 10 years of taking the drug, would you still take it?" In a class of about 80 students, including some scholarship athletes, nearly half the class said Yes. The study results (I don't remember the exact numbers) were very similar, and I believe the Yes answers were a little higher. This was also some years ago, so today I would bet the Yes answers would be higher as the pressure to win at all costs and the commercial drive of people steadily increases.


• The 10/20/2003 Sports Illustrated magazine had this statistic in their "Go Figure" column:
  $25,000 - Amount each member of the US women's national soccer team earned for finishing in third place in the Women's World Cup.
  $58,500 - Amount players would have made had they won the Cup.
  $200,000 - Amount each US men's player won for reaching the quarterfinals on the World Cup in 2002.



• To finish up, an article on the NYTimes website had this excellent behind-the-scenes piece on an ATP player trying to break into the Top 100. I copied it here because after a month you have to pay to read articles on the site.
  A Coach's Digital Tools Take Center Court
  By MATT RICHTEL Published: October 16, 2003
  
  Tiburon, Calif. - The serve explodes off Jeff Salzenstein's racket. It is a round yellow missile, traveling 130 miles per hour and capable of freezing the world's top tennis players in their Reeboks. But this rocket underscores its server's consternation. If he can hit a ball like this, Salzenstein wonders until it hurts, why must he toil only on the outskirts of greatness?
  
  Enter the nutritionist, spiritual adviser, stretching coach and yoga instructor. Salzenstein consults each to help him to rise above his world tennis ranking: No. 125, or relative obscurity. And he comes here, to the Peninsula Tennis Club, to sit in front of John Yandell's Sony laptop computer and figure out if ones and zeroes will at last unlock his full potential.
  
  "I've always been ranked between 150 and 200," Salzenstein said. "My goals are much higher."
  He pointed to the computer. "I have nothing to lose by trying this."
  
  The major sports increasingly employ technology not just to improve their equipment and safety, but also to train, using computers to quantify performance and help athletes push their potential. Tennis has not been in the forefront, but Yandell believes the future of the sport's instruction will revolve around digital imagery, and he is working with Salzenstein to prove his point.
  
  A coach with a Yale history degree who once tutored John McEnroe on his serve, Yandell proposes a seemingly simple concept. He wants to use digital photography to break down the serves, forehands and backhands of the greatest players of all time, then let others modify their own swings to incorporate some of the most successful techniques.
  
  He plans to videotape the world's best players in three dimensions using super-high-speed digital cameras. Then he wants to reduce the tennis swing to a science; he wants to measure the precise position of the arm at impact, the path of the racket head over the full swing, and the speed and angles of body rotation.
  
  He would like to change the way people teach tennis, which he said is "an invisible game" because neither coaches nor fans really know what is happening. The trouble, he said, is that the swing happens so quickly that the naked eye cannot pick up what separates the swing mechanics of the greats from mere mortals or near-greats like Jeff Salzenstein.
  
  "The basic issues of technique are in complete disarray, confusion and dispute among the so-called experts and authorities," Yandell said. "If you get the best coaches after a couple of beers, they'll tell you, 'I don't know what's really happening.' "
  
  Yandell has plenty of fans in the tennis world, but they wonder how much technology can help. Nick Bollettieri, a plain-talking coach who has worked with Andre Agassi, Monica Seles, Boris Becker and Serena and Venus Williams, said there was some value in showing students images of great players because the students can find a style that is comfortable.
  
  But whether the good players can become great by trying to copy the mechanics of great players is another matter. "If you don't have the goods, I don't care what you look at," Bollettieri said.
  
  And as for Salzenstein's chances of breaking into the top tier, he has his doubts.
  
  "Let me say something to you: Salzenstein's 30," Bollettieri said. "If he's going to do this, he's going to have to defy the law."
  
  That's one reason Salzenstein is a logical testing ground. For one thing, success is not guaranteed. A two-time All-American at Stanford, he was injured during his first year on the pro tour. He spent three years sidelined. Now he is a veritable senior citizen in his sport.
  
  But at 6-foot-1, lean and strong with a smoking serve, he has the physical tools to try to emulate the world's top 10 players. Perhaps more significant is his obsessive willpower, his eagerness to make every reasonable modification in his game.
  
  Yandell characterizes the moment that a racket strikes a ball as a "genetic event," meaning that not everyone will have the DNA to emulate Agassi's quickness or Pete Sampras's serve. But Salzenstein does not concede that his deficiency is hereditary, and he plans to use computers to propel his swing to another level.
  
  Sitting at Yandell's computer, he watches an image of himself side by side with one of Agassi. Each hits a forehand, and Salzenstein studies the images, frame by frame. He is looking for clues to why he might hit a ball into the net, whereas Agassi would hit a winner. He looks at the position of Agassi's body and the racket; in a few minutes he and Yandell will go out the court and try to put some of what they observed into practice.
  
  "Agassi has the eyes and hands to step into the ball," he said. "I believe I have the eyes and hands, too. It must be something else; his technique is far superior to mine."
  
  Before their passions collided, Yandell and Salzenstein had already invested themselves wholeheartedly in tennis. Growing up in Denver, Salzenstein put enormous pressure on himself to succeed, even prompting his parents to urge him to let up. After graduating from Stanford in 1996, he turned pro and made more than $100,000 his first year on tour, with the highlight being a four-set loss to Michael Chang (then ranked No. 2 in the world) in the second round of the 1997 United States Open.
  
  His asset was a big serve and determination. But in the late 90's he had surgery on an ankle and then a knee, missing two years.
  
  In 2000, already in his late 20's, he began a long climb back. He could take solace in the fact that even the most demanding sports were now accommodating older athletes. Jerry Rice, one of football's greatest receivers ever, still devastates opponents at 41. Barry Bonds is 39. Agassi, still one of the world's top ranked tennis players, is 33.
  
  Also going for Salzenstein is Yandell's experience. After graduating from Yale in 1975, Yandell intended to be a professor. But he applied his interest in academics to the court, trying to make a science of the game.
  
  In 1985, he produced a best-selling videotape with Ivan Lendl and McEnroe called "The Winning Edge." In the meantime he was trying to push the envelope in applying digital imagery to coaching.
  
  Two years ago, he started working with the Stanford tennis team. He used super-high-speed video - 250 frames per second - to study the strokes of the university's two top players, and made an interesting discovery.
  
  The top-ranked player hit his fastest serves about 125 miles an hour. But the second-ranked player was serving only around 110 miles an hour - respectable, but not as fast as most elite players. The assumption had long been that the second-ranked player had insufficient racket speed, as he had been told for years by other coaches.
  
  With the images, Yandell applied a three-dimensional biomechanical analysis to study the racket's speed and the point of impact. It turned out that the second-ranked player, in fact, had faster racket speed than the top-ranked player. But the second-ranked player's racket head speed peaked before the point of impact, meaning the trajectory of his swing was less than ideal (the angle of his swing was at a much greater tangent to the path of the ball than was the swing of the top-ranked player).
  
  They modified the serve, and faster speeds followed. "I'm not saying John's technology was the only thing that made the serve better, but it definitely did help," said John Whitlinger, a tennis coach at Stanford. The next year, that player, David Martin, became No. 1 on the Stanford team and one of the top 15 college players in the country, and today he is on the professional satellite tour "toughing it out," Whitlinger said.
  
  The next step for Yandell is to create an archive of the images of the top players, and then apply a three-dimensional analysis. The software would measure not only the speed and path of the racket, but also the position and the movement patterns of the body parts. The obstacle is mostly resources: the cost of deploying four super-high-speed cameras at a pro event for one week is around $35,000.
  
  To offset the cost, Yandell is raising money through Advanced Tennis Research, a nonprofit group he established with the aim of combining technology, science and tennis. He would like to develop teaching techniques that could be used for recreational players at all levels.
  
  So far, his work with Salzenstein has yielded mixed results. [On a September swing through Asia, Salzenstein lost in straight sets in the second round of the Shanghai Open to Mark Philippoussis, a highly ranked opponent who was a finalist at Wimbledon in July. He also lost to a lower-ranked player, Bjorn Phau, in the first round of the Japan Open.]
  
  Still, Salzenstein is feeling good about Yandell's help. "I have a good visual of where I am at and where I want to go," he said.