Visualizing Tennis Matches as Nested Stories

This work is about data-driven storytelling in tennis. Tennis has a peculiar scoring system that makes it challenging for the general audience to understand tennis matches. But from a storytelling perspective, the tennis scoring system has unique benefits because it creates a nested story structure. Dividing a tennis match into sets and games helps manage the tempo and rhythm of a story while creating suspense on multiple levels. The ad-scoring rule helps prolong the struggle, delay the outcome, and create suspense. However, the traditional sports news media has failed to present tennis matches as nested stories, and the suspense is often lost in the news report and match highlight videos. In this paper, we describe a novel visualization method to present tennis matches as nested stories. This visualization can help readers better understand the narratives of tennis matches without the barriers of the scoring system and the written language. In essence, this is a universal visual language that presents the stories of tennis matches in an intuitive way. Such visualizations can supplement the traditional textual and video coverage of tennis matches. It can also be applied to other sports with similar nested story structures. Our preliminary user studies showed highly positive user first impressions.