Geeky to the Cor.e

Y'all know that we like to Go Geek now and then, getting into deep tennis technique, history or statistics. Many of you are masters of the Internet resources that can quantify your theories or, like Rosangel, be exploited to give the rest of us new ways of looking at rankings and players. Well, I've got news of an amazing resource that tennis KADs and certain insomniacs we know are just going to love. It's the Core Tennis website, which was developed in conjunction with the Mouratoglou Tennis Academy outside Paris, France.

The mastermind of the website is a long-time friend of Patrick Mouratoglou, Djamel Abed. I met with Djamel at the US Open, and he walked me through the site. Core tennis is a free site, although it has a subscription component that will be of great value to anyone even remotely in the tennis business for a reason that cuts right to the core of Core. The site intends to track every official tournament result, junior as well as ATP and WTA tours, with flexible components that will enable someone like, say, Babolat or the USTA, to instantly track the up to the minute results of every one of its tournament players or clients. Right now, Core has "profiles" on over 32,000 players of either gender at every level.

So let me walk you through some of Core's unique features, starting from the home page, tab-by-tab:

Results: This tab will be self-explanatory, but note that it has a bar at the top that allows you to scroll back through past weeks/events. But just click on, say, Mumbai. Now, when the draw pops up, you can click on the See it in Full Page option over on the upper right to get a view of the entire draw.

Now, click on a name in the draw - say, Richard Gasquet.

You will be re-directed to Gasquet's profile page, which contains an abundance of vital information including his recent tournament results (scroll down). If you click on any of those events, you will once again be able to open the entire draw by clicking on the See it in Full Page function. Then, if you click on Gasquet (or anyone else) in that draw, it will highlight every match he's won in bright yellow.

Impressed? Just wait.

Now, on Gasquet's profile page, click on the View Graph icon (alongside his current ranking). This will produce a graph of Gasquet's ranking history for the year (Try this with Roger Federer or Rafael Nadal and you get a flat line, which is kind of cool to ogle).

So let's move on to the Players tab. This one is straighforward. When you click on it, you are taken to a page where you type in the name of the player in question (selecting gender, category and region are optional). But caution: use just the last name (this is a glitch of sorts that Djamel said might be changed); if you put "Rafael Nadal" instead of "Nadal" you will get a failed search message.

In some cases (Murray), you will get a long list of players: that's where the other components of the Search function (gender etc.) come in handy. Then, when you've found a player, you click on the More Info line. This will enable you to view Nadal's graph and his results, and to track him through various tournaments as well in highlighter yellow.

You want to see tennis's future? Go the Players and type in Boluda-Purkess; then examine the record of the kid who is said by many to be following in the footsteps of Rafael Nadal. But don't think you need to know the name to play the game. There are ways you can find him on your own without having heard of Boluda-Purkess, but I'm jumping ahead.

The Tournaments tab is self-explanatory; play around to check out its functions. Ditto for the Calendar tab.

Things get very interesting again at the Rankings tab. Notice that going there now opens up a bar-menu on the left where you can find, among other things, the biggest drop in rankings for the week or year. That's where you can learn that Greg Rusedski dropped 756 places this year. We know that this is because Rusedski retired, of course, but this feature will be of interest to anyone who follows the real journeymen of the ATP or WTA - or juniors. And the new Top 10 Graph (on the bar-menu) is, again, fun to look at. And remember - clicking on any of the names in any of those rankings takes you to the player's profile, complete results, and opponent-by-opponent drawsheets.

The Stats tab is also a hoot. Who knew that that that ATP's leader in bagels served is France's  Luarent Recourdec? The most familiar name on that graph is David Ferrer, about No. 25 in bagels served. And if you choose Winning Percentage from the menu, you may be surprised to see that Roger Federer has only the fifth-best winning percentage. But then when you look at how many matches the leaders have played (always a big issue in calculating percentages) your disappointment will quickly turn to respect. He's played 49 matches more than the leaders. The overall leader in the "wins" ranking, though, is Rafael Nadal. Bear in mind that these statistics exist for every gender and level, just click on the tool bar near the top of the page if you want to see the leaders (or losers) in any department in, say, the Girls 12s.

I haven't poked around much in the Articles tab, so have at it on your own.

Now, you'll also notice some boxes/tabs on the right: the top one walks you through the Graph features of the site, the next one down is the Bagel Report.

Enjoy the site, everyone. Djamel will be around in France today to field comments and answer any questions about the website. Let's welcome him to the Tribe!