My name is Will Corby and I hail from the central United States. Let me tell you how I became a bit of a tennis junkie which led to the creation of this blog. I have always enjoyed statistics, especially baseball growing up. It is always intriguing to hear some of the stats they spout off during TV broadcasts. Another thing that gets me going is tournaments, especially big ones. NCAA basketball's March Madness is still the best sporting event under the sun.
Enter: Wimbledon 2008
I had never really payed too much attention to tennis growing. I could probably list the four slams as well as a handful of players (Federer, Roddick, Hewitt, Sampras, Agassi, Capriati, and the Williams sisters). Then during a slow day at work I happened across the live scores from Wimbledon 2008. I was very intrigued. Here was about 16 tennis matches going on at once (tournament!) with scores constantly being updated (statistics!). Then I got into the seeds and watching one after the other (especially on the women's side) fall out. At the end of the fortnight, it just so happened that Federer and Nadal play the greatest match of all time.
Soon I was reading up on some of the players, and tuning in to US Open games and casually paying attention. Then in 2009, I decided to make a list of all the seeds for the Aussie Open and record what rounds they were eliminated (stats again!). I repeated the process for the French and Wimbledon and along came a spreadsheet tracking the players in the slams throughout 2009. (You can find some info compiled from that spreadsheet on the 2009 Slam Summary page.) Then I needed more. I started paying attention to other tournament, then dived into the rankings system to figure out how players moved up and down. Next came the Davis Cup animal, a REALLY massive tournament between countries, not just individuals.
Now it's 2010 and I've repeated my Aussie Open seed list and have the beginnings of another spreadsheets. I'm also bringing up live scores to little tournaments (there are some advantages to that 6 hr time difference between Chicago and Paris) and learning the personalities of the players. And now I've begotten a blog.
I would also like to comment that I don't overly enjoy watching tennis on TV though I catch parts of matches here and there. I enjoy passively watching the live scores tick while performing other task. Then I enjoy analyzing the results, and analyzing the rankings, etc, etc. So I've decided to put some of this analyzation up for other tennis (or stats) junkies to enjoy.
I hope to keep this blog up to date with tennis results, rankings, and statistics commentary, but bear with me if I'm slow to upload new content. I do have a life outside tennis still. And above all, enjoy and have fun!
-Will Corby