St. Petersburg Open

Sunday 26 October
In the doubles final of the St Petersburg Open, German pair Michael Kohlmann and Rainer Schuettler were defeated by Nenad Zimonjic and Julian Knowle 67(1) 36. During the ceremony, Rainer addressed the small crowd and took home his second finalists trophy on his fourth trip to St Petersburg.

In singles play, Guga beat Sargsian 64 63. Over in Basel, Nalbandian withdrew from the final due to his wrist injury, so Coria took the title. Organizers scrambled to find an opponent for an exhibition match against Coria. Unknown Swiss player Jean-Claude Scherrer was flown in by helicopter from his rural home.

There's Something About Rainer... Articles

• ATP's recap of finals, has mini mention of doubles

Saturday 25 October
Sargsian Stops Schuettler In Semis

Armenian Sargis Sargsian continued his solid play in St Petersburg, upsetting top-seed Rainer Schuettler 36 36 to advance to the finals. Earlier in the day Kuerten stopped Corretja's run with a 64 63 win.
Rainer took to the court again in the next match of the day as he and Michael Kohlmann played in the doubles semifinal against Garcia and Prieto. The German duo scored a straight set 64 64 win and will play for the title against Julian Knowle and Nenad Zimonjic. They scored a huge upset win of their own (Michael and Rainer previously defeated the 3rd seed) in knocking out top ranked Max Mirnyi and Mahesh Bhupathi 64 64 in the semis. In doubles entry rankings, Mirnyi is now #1 with Bhupathi 4th (2 and 3 occupied by the Bryan twins), and in the Champions Race the pair is second behind the Bryans, 902 to 878.
I believe this is the first time that Zimonjic and Knowle have paired up in doubles competition. This year with other players they have had some doubles success, as Knowle - who plays with Kohlmann a good deal, won Chennai, was a finalist in Copenhagen, and reached the semis in Metz and Casablanca with the German. He won Besancon with Erlich and with Melzer he was a Newport finalist and Bucharest semifinalist.
Zimonjic has won Belgrade (w/ Ilia Bozoljac) and Delray Beach (w/ Leander Paes), reached the finals in Valencia (w/ Brian MacPhie) and St. Poelten (w/ Sargis Sargsian) and the semis in Doha and Marseille (w/ Nicolas Escude) and in Indianapolis (w/ Justin Gimelstob).

The Sunday doubles final follows the 2pm Kuerten and Sargsian matchup.

Schuettler Shots... Photos



There's Something About Rainer... Articles

• ATP's review of the day. Sargsian said, "Rainer is so solid, for sure he didn't play his best match today but it gives me a lot of confidence."
  Rainer's quotes: "He played a good match. He made just a few mistakes and I wanted to go for too much so I missed a couple of my forehands and backhands and I didn't serve that well."
  "I'm not tired. Every day is new and definitely I didn't play my best tennis today but he is in good shape. He won all his matches pretty easy."
  "I hope that I keep going in doubles and the week was good for me and hopefully I will be better in doubles than singles."


• Sports Network brief report


• Wire report on Saturday in St Petersburg


• Sport.ard recap


• Sport1 mention


• Yahoo Deutschland recap


These are all brief reports:
• TennisMagazin.de update


• Netzeitung


• Sportgate


• Sky Sports


• Sportbild

Friday 24 October
Schuettler Over Youzhny, Into Semifinals

Rainer Schuettler moved into his third semifinal of the past four tournaments as he defeated Mikhail Youzhny 63 63. (Schuettler broke out the US Open/Lyon shirt for this one to avoid the battle of the Fila redshirts.) Sargis Sargsian is his next opponent, as the Armenian defeated Burgsmuller 63 61 earlier in the day. It will be the fifth meeting between them, but the first of 2003. Previously, Schuettler won at Wimbledon 2002 63 60 61, the 2001 Australian Open 63 75 46 64, and their first contest back in 1998 when a then-ranked 115th Rainer beat 64th-ranked Sargsian in Newport 62 67 64. Sargsian won their tight 2001 Morocco meeting 64 57 57. This year he has been a quarterfinalist in Chennai, Bucharest, Wroclaw and Valencia and was a finalist in Moscow. After his Moscow and Vienna appearances, Sargsian is now ranked 42nd.

Other winners on Friday were (3) Kuerten def (6) Spadea 64 76 and continuing his great run, wildcard Corretja knocked off defending champ and the #2 seed Grosjean 46 62 76(5).

Saturday's Schedule: Corretja v Kuerten on Center Court at 2pm (local time) with Rainer's match to follow. Then, after some brief rest, Schuettler and Kohlmann play their semifinal doubles match vs Prieto and Garcia.

Schuettler Shots... Photos



There's Something About Rainer... Articles

• Reuters mention by Gennady Fyodorov. Rainer said, ""It was a good match for me as I played very consistently. I think he was under a little bit of pressure playing here. We played two weeks ago in Lyon, he was leading there, but I won the match. Maybe he was still thinking about that match."


• Wire report on Friday's results. "We are good friends and so it was a difficult situation but I'm happy I'm in the semifinals," said Schuettler, adding "He's (Sargsian) played some good matches and beat everybody pretty easy. I saw the match against Lars Burgsmuller so I was surprised he didn't miss a ball, so I definitely have to play well." Sargsian's quote: "It's very difficult to play Schuettler. He's in very good shape right now."


• Sport.ard quick report


• Sport1 mini recap


• TennisMagazin.de quick blurb


• Netzeitung mention


• Channel News Asia brief recap


• Sports Networkreport

Thursday 23 October
Rainer Advances to 15th Quarters of 2003
Rainer Schuettler advanced to the St Petersburg Open quarterfinals - his third in four appearances here - with a 62 63 win over Vladimir Voltchkov. Already in the quarters are wildcard Alex Corretja and Vince Spadea, as well as Lars Burgsmuller who got through with a 64 64 win over Vicente. Sargis Sargsian will be Lars' next opponent.

Next up for Rainer is Mikhail Youzhny (5th seed), who defeated Kafelnikov 62 62. The Russian, a friend and frequent doubles partner of Schuettler, has reached the semifinals in Halle, Lyon (vs Rainer), and Doha and the quarterfinals in Stuttgart, Munich, and Bastad; he and Rainer were doubles semifinalists in Lyon. Youzhny, now ranked 41st, and Schuettler have played each other twice - both this year and both times the German came out ahead. Earlier this summer Rainer won their first round match at TMS Canada 62 64, and in the Lyon semis Youzhny nearly scored an upset before Schuettler cam back from 04 in the 3rd, 63 36 75.

Youzhny, who can be billed as the future of Russian tennis, has also had success at the St Petersurg Open, but both he and Rainer are after their first title here. Last year he defeated Younes El Aynaoui 36 64 63, Guillermo Coria 64 36 64, Andrei Pavel 61 63, and Vladimir Voltchkov 64 63 before falling in the finals to Sebastien Grosjean 57 46. In 2001 he beat Alex Calatrava 75 75 before losing a tight match to then-6th-ranked Yevgeny Kafelnikov 76(1) 67(6) 57.

Other winners on the day were: (3)G Kuerten (BRA) d V Hanescu (ROM) 76(1) 76(1) and defending champion (2)S Grosjean (FRA) d A Dupuis (FRA) 62 62.
Their Friday match is scheduled "not before 7pm" on Center Court.

Later in the day Rainer and doubles partner Michael Kohlmann scored an upset win over third-seeded Cibulec and Vizner 76(3) 62 in the quarterfinals. They next face the Argentinean pair of Sebastian Prieto and Martin Garcia who advanced to the semis in a walkover. They have won Salinas, were Prague finalists, and reached the semifinals at Kosice this year.

Schuettler Shots... Photos


There's Something About Rainer... Articles

• Reuters wire story from Thursday about how "Steady Schuettler took slow road to the top."


• ATP's recap of the day. "Today was a pretty good match. I didn't miss a lot of balls. I felt pretty confident on the court and I won nearly all the rallies from the baseline, so I was pretty happy with the way I played," said Rainer. "I feel pretty fit. The longer the match is, the better I feel. I always have trouble in the beginning, but then when I'm warm, I enjoy it. I like to run and I like the long rallies. The longer I play, the better I feel." Mikhail, on facing Rainer, added "If you take a look at his matches, you will find out that he's man who doesn't know what a mistake is."


• ESPN's AP mini-mention


• Fox Sports article


• Netzeitung mention that Rainer and Lars advance to the quarters


• Sport.ard's same wire report


• Sport1 article


• Sportbild brief recap


• Sportgate writeup


• TennisMagazin.de article on win

Wednesday 22 October

Today Rainer defeated qualifier Jean-Rene Lisnard 76(5) 61 to advance to the second round of the St Petersburg Open. He came back from 0-4 in the tiebreak to get through the first set, but after that fell back into his normal game to claim the second. Schuettler, now an impressive 65-26 on the year, next takes on Belarussian Vladimir Voltchkov - his recent opponent from Davis Cup.
The two played a tough five sets in their singles first round, with Rainer winning 63 36 67 64 64. Voltchkov advanced after defeating wildcard Vadim Davletshin 76(6) 63 and this year he has appeared in five quarterfinals: San Jose (won doubles title there with Hyung-Taik Lee), Istanbul, Memphis, Delray Beach and Nottingham.

Schuettler's match is scheduled for 3pm on Center Court, and then Rainer must play doubles with Michael Kohlmann later that afternoon/evening. The quarterfinals match against the Czech team of Vizner and Cibulec is third up on Court 1 after Lars Burgsmuller v Vicente and Dupuis v Grosjean. Reports on the doubles can be seen below in Tuesday's writeup.

The Schuettler/Voltchkov winner faces the Kafelnikov/Mikhail Youzhny (5th seed) winner.

Schuettler Shots... Photos


There's Something About Rainer... Articles

• Expatica article about the state of Germany's sports. Appeared after Tokyo and Lyon but I didn't want it buried back in those past posts. "It's pretty tough coming after (Boris) Becker, (Michael) Stich and (Steffi) Graf," said the 27- year-old Schuettler. "Tommy Haas got to second in the world before he was injured, Nicolas Kiefer was fourth, and now I'm sixth. So you can't say, like some people at home, that German tennis is dead."


• ATP's recap of Wednesday in Russia. Rainer said, "The first set was pretty tough. He (Lisnard) played a lot of rallies and he played well. I always had a chance to break him but I didn't take my chances. And then I was 0-4 in the tiebreaker in the first set but I won 7-5. That was very important. The second set I played with much more confidence. I put more pressure on him."


• Netzeitung's quick recap


• TennisMagazin.de article. "The first set was rather hard, and I was happy that I found the way back," said Rainer.


• Sportgate's similar story


• Sport.ard mention of match and the results of the other German players.


• Sport1 recap


• Sportbild article


• Sports Illustrated AP wire report. "The first set was pretty tough with many rallies and I was lucky to be back from love-40 on a tiebreaker," Schuettler said. "In the second set I put much more pressure on him."


• Channel News Asia brief report


• Fox sports article


• San Francisco Gate blurb. Interesting Kafelnikov quote.

Tuesday 21 October
In doubles action, the German pair of Rainer Schuettler and Michael Kohlmann won their first round match against Anthony Dupuis and Andrei Olhovskiy, 62 75. They will next face a tough second round match against Tomas Cibulec and Pavel Vizner, the tourney's third seed. The Czech combo defeated Yevgeny Kafelnikov and Radek Stepanek 63 60 in their Tuesday match. This year Vizner and Cibulec have won Copenhagen and Stuttgart, were finalists in Marseille and Milan, and reached the semis at 's-Hertogenbosch, Halle, Long Island, and Munich. In the ATP Doubles Race, they are currently 12th, but only 30 points out of 9th place.

Rainer's singles match against Lisnard is scheduled for "not before 5pm" on Center Court. Try the ATP site for updated scores, the tournament site for an online scoreboard and a possible Media Player video, and Bet & Win for a ticker.
They play late here, it's 11pm St P time and the Kuerten match just finished the first set.

Monday 20 October
After a second round loss in Madrid, Rainer Schuettler had some days off to rest up and prepare for the St. Petersburg Open. This is Rainer's fourth appearance at the St. Petersburg Open since 1998. (Of note: there is a Media Player option on the site.)

His first match is against Jean-Rene Lisnard (FRA) and it appears to be scheduled for Wednesday. This will be the fourth meeting between the two, with the Frenchman having a 2-1 advantage. This year at the French Open, Rainer won in the 2nd round 46 62 64 60 while they started the year in Chennai where Lisnard won 26 57 in the quarterfinals. Their first meeting was the 2002 US Open where Rainer retired at 63 76(2) 46 04. In 2003 Lisnard reached the semifinals in Chennai and was in the quarters at Prostejov and Wroclaw.

Rainer is the top seed for this event, followed by Grosjean, Kuerten, Mirnyi, Youzhny, Spadea, Gaudio and Safin. Nicolas Kiefer and Lars Burgsmuller are the other German singles players in this event.

Schuettler is also in the doubles draw with countryman Michael Kohlmann, they face Anthony Dupuis (FRA) and Andrei Olhovskiy (RUS) in the first round on Tuesday as the last match on Court 2. The German duo has teamed up before: 2003 in Feb for World Group Davis Cup play vs Argentina, March in Scottsdale and Miami TMS and May at the Hamburg TMS; 2001 Munich in April and Hamburg TMS in May; June 2000 for Halle and Oct 1999 at the Stuttgart Indoor.


Previously in this event, Rainer faired quite well in his three showings (1998, 2000 and 2001), and after spending 2002 in Stockholm he's returned to action at the "Peterburgsky."
In 1998, back when the event was in February, he lost to D. Hrbaty 36 46 in the first round while in 2000 the 56th ranked Schuettler had victories over Harel Levy (ISR) (57) 61 63 and David Prinosil (GER) (43) 62 63 before falling to Marat Safin (RUS) (2) 46 61 36 in the quarters. In 2001 he upset Juan Carlos Ferrero (ESP) (5) 76(10) 64, beat Daniel Vacek (CZE) (182) 62 64, defeated Max Mirnyi (BLR) (30) 75 63 in the quarters and then Michael Llodra (FRA) (141) 63 64 in the semifinals. He was stopped again by Safin (11), this time in the finals, 63 36 36. Rainer entered this last tournament of the year ranked 46th and finished the year at 48.

Schuettler Shots... PhotosHere are some images from 2000 and 2001 of Schuettler in Russia









Play tends to begin at noon and 1pm (local time) on the courts and the evening session begins at 7pm. St. Petersburg is 2 hours ahead of Germany and 8 for NY.

Draws and order of play for event can be found here on the ATP website.

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.