Craig O’Shannessy is a world-renowned tennis strategist and pioneer in data-driven analysis of the game. As the founder of Brain Game Tennis, Craig has revolutionised coaching by leveraging match statistics to uncover patterns and insights that drive success.  His groundbreaking work has guided top players, including Novak Djokovic, Andy Murray and Jannik Sinner, making him a leader in modern tennis strategy and an advocate for innovation in the sport.  We had the privilege of sitting down with Craig to explore the journey behind his remarkable success and uncover the valuable insights he offers for today’s business world.

For anyone not familiar with you and your work, tell us exactly what you do?

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The best way to understand it, is that I've been described as the ‘Moneyball’ person in tennis.  I’m a tennis strategy analyst - so it's a combination of analytics and video. I started a strategy website back in 2013 (www.braingametennis.com), and it was at a time when not a lot of research and data on tennis was being undertaken. So I took it upon myself to gather as much data as I could, (particularly from the Grand Slams) and research our sport, and that has now grown over the years. I’ve been a strategy analyst for the ATP World Tour and two Grand Slams (Australian Open and Wimbledon), a strategy analyst for top players like Djokovic, Murray and Matteo Berrettini and I've written extensively for the New York Times and the Sydney Morning Herald. I just really want to help players. If you have a pie chart of what makes a successful athlete, you can look at it and improve their schedule, their sleep, their nutrition, their fitness, their technique AND their strategy.

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In 2005, I created my own match tagging panel with software from Swiss company, Dartfish. My work involves tagging players in their matches and deriving insights from the data the tagging gives me. This technology allows me to hone into specific derivatives of a match i.e. I only want to see backhand errors. After the match has been recorded and tagged, I create a match intelligence report with all the match statistics and drill down on the patterns of play.

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There are three components to my business – 1) my website where I have 11 strategy courses and 60 webinars,    2) speaking engagements around the world for tennis and business, and 3) writing for companies such as the ATP, tennis magazines, newspapers and my website.

You analysed the game of tennis and then codified it with these patterns becoming your signature and IP.  How did that journey start?

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I wanted players at all levels of the game to become better, and coaching in the 90’s primarily focused on technique.  However, I knew strategy was also very important. When I was a junior, I knew my job was not to play great - my job was to make my opponent play bad. On today's practise court, unfortunately it's not about how to play the game, it's more about how to hit a ball. So understanding the opponent was my greatest strength, however it was born from a weakness of not being that good of a player. I realised as a young kid, most players were better than me, but I could beat them. So my tennis IQ was high and I’ve been able to turn that into a thriving business.

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Official analytics of tennis started in 1990, but it was very primitive - an umpire in a chair that is mandated to record the first and second serve, ace or double fault, etc.  Fast forward to 2015 when I was coaching at the Australian Open and IBM introduced a new element called ‘rally length’. Using this data in my spreadsheets, I uncovered that 70% of all rallies are played in 0-4 shots, which means each player only hits a maximum of two shots each. Historically, tennis was all about consistency, shot tolerance, repetition, grinding, and suffering - that's our sport - you must hit a million balls. This statistic was shocking to me. The data showed 70% of 0-4 shots, 20% of 5-8 shots and only 10% of 9+ shots.  However when you go to the practise courts you see 90% of practise is focused on the 10% of the match, which is the longer rally.

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Two things stood out to me. Firstly, there were so many more short rallies than we ever thought. And secondly, our practise court is broken because the ‘serve and return’ (the 0-4 shots) are tucked in to the end of the lesson or sometimes not even practised. So that was a big breakthrough, to be the first person in our sport that knew this information. I then created my first online course called ‘the first four shots’ and this was when I started to monetise my intel in the tennis world.

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Where did the business mind come from to apply your intelligence and develop strategy courses for players and coaches?

I didn't know whether those numbers would hold true for players at all levels, so I went back into my software and inputted dozens of junior matches to see if there was a correlation between junior and elite levels - and there was. Where a pro will be around 70% of 0- 4 shots, a junior 12 and under may be 63% and it slowly increases the better you get. Once I knew this was something I could wash right through tennis, I knew I could bring it to market.

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I asked Djokovic who I was working with at the time “how many shots do you think that you play the most?” He guessed 4. I worked with Andy Murray as well, and he guessed 4. I asked the 2016 Australian Open Coaches Conference, and they guessed between 4-8. My data showed a rally length of 4 happens 7.5% of the time, and a rally of 1 happens 30% of the time. So I asked Murray, “as the number 1 player in the world, how can you can get it so wrong and what do you believe is an acceptable range to be wrong with something that's so important in your game? If I'm your coach and I give you some information, however there's a good chance I could be 5% wrong, are you OK with that?” And he said no. And I reply “well you are 400% away from the most common rally length that underpins your career. Why is this?” He had to think about it and came up with a good answer, in that short rallies are very unspectacular and in fact we think short rallies are a failure to reach the ‘promised land’ of the long rally.

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So I followed the data, and information I knew that tennis wanted and needed, and in 2015, I get the biggest breakthrough of my career when I discover IBM creates this data but doesn’t know what to do with it. This leads to, in 2016, having some success coaching on the tour, and then working with Novak for three years (2017-2019).

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Setting up an online business for a tennis coach is a brave move. Did you seek out your own coaching or just use your instincts?

I remember around this time I was coaching at a winter training ground for Olympians in The Canary Islands. My phone broke the first week I was there, so I really felt isolated. The weather and scenery were amazing, so I started thinking about what I want to do when I return to the USA. I decided that instead of chasing a job opening - something that was available to me - I changed the narrative, asked myself what my dream job would be. I decided I wanted to work on the Pro Tour, but on my terms. I love strategy. I love analysis. I want to be the best tennis strategy analyst in the world. And I'm going to create my dream job. And three years later, I'm helping Novak win Grand Slams. So it played out, it worked exactly how I wanted it to be, and it was having that commitment to say, ‘I'm going do it’.

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In business, people are often coming up with new ideas, yet often fail. What are some of the elements that led you to that catalytic uptake of change?

The first thing that I highly encourage everyone to do, is to create a framework. If you don't have a framework the water (ideas) will run in every direction. You must understand your area of expertise. I wanted to be the world’s leading tennis strategy mind but I needed a framework to get me there. One of the first things I uncovered in 2015, having looked at all this data, was that tennis ends in two ways - it's a winner or it's an error. Tennis is 70% errors, so the goal changed to not hitting winners, but extracting errors from opponents. Quite often, the match loser hits more winners than the match winner. We used to want to be king or queen of this 30% piece of the pie, but in fact, there is a much more important 70% piece of that pie that you want to dominate.

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The framework started with consistency. You want to make your opponent uncomfortable and go to their weaker side consistently. They might get the first shot and maybe the second shot back, however it’s unlikely they will be successful in the third or fourth shot from their weaker side. Consistency will extract errors. I then cut the court up into directions creating a three-dimensional cube of the four elements of consistency, direction, depth and height. I then added to this the two elements of the ball (spin and power) and added where to stand on the court. And lastly is time, reducing your opponent’s time to get prepared (i.e. rebounding it back quickly). So once I had that framework of the eight elements to force an error, I could organise every practise around that.

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Once you established the framework, was it then about the data and relentlessly finding the data points that work for your players and beating their opponents?

Yes, but first it was deciding what data points mattered most. I started with an analysis of the No. 1 player in the world to model off the best. The number 1 player in the world is going to lose some matches each year, but not many, so the best players in the world are winning 9 out of 10 matches. I uncovered the number 1 player in the world only wins 55% of their points. I wanted to gravitate to the patterns that deliver the higher percentages.

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Most businesses don’t spend enough time looking at the arena in which they compete and understand competitors. How important is it to your players?

I always ask my players “how many times in the last year have you walked off the court and said, I played great today, I played absolutely awesome, I was on fire, and I can't wait to do that again?” The standard answer is twice. They're going to walk off the court twice a year (out of maybe 50 matches) and say my “A Game” turned up, so you can't rely on that, you must control the other, the opponent. A player’s job is not to play their A game. It’s our job is to make the opponent play their B game.

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You've worked with top players. Who was the most challenging player that you worked with and how did you overcome this?

Djokovic, because there's two sides to that coin. In one way, he was challenging in a positive way and the other way he was a complete dream. During our first meeting I asked him how best I could help him. He told me there were three things he wanted.

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1) To create short videos of him doing things right and some things he was not doing well so he could learn. Shockingly, he told me he's hardly ever watched himself play, and I almost fell off my chair. It just wasn't cemented into his rituals. So the first thing was looking at the data and looking at what he was doing incorrectly i.e. when a ball would come down the middle to his backhand (even though he has the world's best backhand), I told him to run around and turn that into a forehand because he was hitting 72% forehand winners vs. 28% backhand winners. And when I showed him the analytics, he was 100% in.

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2) He wanted analysis of every opponent he was going to play. That was the difficult part because at the time those analytics took seven hours a match to produce. Back then I did it all myself, but it’s now completely automated. However, the good side of that, is that I learnt so much and I would be half the coach that I am today without having done the recording, tagging and analytics myself to learn from.

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3) Federer and Nadal, he wanted to know more about them than they knew about him. Again, a challenging part of working with Novak, because for somebody to deliver this to a man who knows so much about the sport and who demands excellence, it took a lot of time. One of the things Novak does well is that he runs the game plan, he doesn't freelance, he doesn't go off script. If I said to do something, he said OK. He committed to the programme and he loved it, he loves the sport, he loves the discipline. He is phenomenal with a great attitude and his ability to decipher and employ a game plan is second to none.

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How does a player work out what value you've added to them?

Novak was one of the first leading players that hired and worked with somebody with my skill set, openly and exclusively. And one of the first people that put a team of experts around him. I'm either going to be an asset or a liability it his mind. So in his mind he thinks ‘Craig is going to help me win matches, so the more money I pay Craig during the year, the more prize money I’m going to win’ - which is a growth mindset. Sometimes for players that are further down the rankings, where things are a little tighter from a budget standpoint, they might look at me as an expense, however, if they do well at a Grand Slam, if they win one match, one good match that I can help them win on the big stage, (maybe going from a second round to a third round) and I'm responsible for the strategy, that money pays for me for the whole year. If you ask any player on the planet, “You're going to play 50 matches but you're only going to pay me money from 1 victory, would you do it?” and they're going to say “yes”.

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How do you tackle exclusivity and not dilute your value?

At the start there was two or three players I was working with before Novak wanted me exclusively. When that happened, I modified the contract. I couldn’t work with anyone in direct competition to Novak, but I was working with the Italian Federation around 2017/2018 with a junior who was on the rise, Matteo Berrettini, and at the time was ranked 80 in the world. The separation was huge however by the end of the year he went to number eight and was too close to the exclusivity clause.

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How do you deal with copycats?

Quite a few people saw what I was doing and copied it, however they’ve gone too far with the analytics. Too often today, there is too much information and the coach and player can't consume and decode this amount of information. I was just at the Rome Masters earlier in the year, and I spoke to a dozen coaches and a dozen players and all of them said they don't understand the data they're getting anymore, it needs to be simplified. The value is in the insights, not the data itself. People can copy my business model, but they don’t have the experiences and insights that are key to making a difference. 

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You are successful, and have also worked with some of the most successful sports people in the world. What do you believe to be three traits of successful people?

1) The ability to tell a story - you must be able to express yourself. You can have the best mind in the world but if you can't articulate it and if it cannot be easily absorbed, you have nothing. You must be able to tell a story.

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2) Knowledge - I'm a specialist coach. I've coached for 30 years. I know tennis inside out and I've created my own protocol. So you must know your industry and you need to be the leader of something in that industry. For me, I have a lot of knowledge because I spent a lot of time drilling down into my sport and learning everything there is to know and from that, I have and will continue to create from it.

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3) Embracing Technology - the analytics with Dartfish and my ability to realise its potential. And now with the growth of AI, I need to be up-to-date with technology, it’s my point of difference, as the old school coaches are not going to be able to do that. You must be relevant today, you must know how to evolve and if you don't evolve with technology, you will get left behind.

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What’s next for you and how do people get in touch with you?

I’m back on the ATP Tour, focusing more on the player and not the opponent. This is my next evolution so that I can stay at the elite level of our sport.

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Feel free to get in touch to arrange for Craig to present or collaborate with your company by reaching out to Elia at elia@connectingin.com.au.

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