An illustrated field guide
Greatness in tennis is a set of solved problems. We reverse-engineer the champions — from real footage, frame by frame — and hand you the controls.
You don't push the ball — you push the court, and it pushes back up the whole chain.
Hips open while the shoulders still trail — the coil that lets smaller players out-hit bigger ones.
Three real frames of one forehand: drop, lag, contact — the racquet's own traced path.
Table of contents.
v0.25 parts · 87 chapters
You don't play yet — but you're falling for the game.
Start with what the numbers on the scoreboard actually mean, then see the machine underneath every shot — enough to watch a match and know exactly what you're looking at.
New to the game, building it right the first time.
Build your game the way the physics demands — up the kinetic chain, then the forehand, the serve, the footwork and the odds — so nothing you groove now has to be unlearned later.
You already play — now steal what the pros know.
Go straight to the mechanisms the best exploit — contact, spin, serve patterns, the return, the big points and the athlete underneath — the edges you can bolt onto a game you already have.
3 live · 4 in production · 80 mapped & researched · next Inside the 4 ms of contact
The Machine
The physics every shot obeys — the body, the tool, the strike, the flight.
The Body as an Engine
- Motion capture
- Force diagrams
The Tool — Racquet & String
- Cutaway diagrams
- Lab data
Contact — The 4 Milliseconds
- High-speed capture
- Physics sims
Ball Flight & The Bounce
- Physics sims
- Trajectory plots
The Arsenal
Every shot in the game, taken apart to the last lever.
The Groundstrokes
- Motion capture
- Engravings
The Serve
- Motion capture
- Serve maps
The Return of Serve
- Reaction data
- Court maps
Net Play & Touch
- Motion capture
- Court maps
The Player
Movement, tactics, the mind, the body — and how to actually train them.
Movement & Footwork
- Footwork traces
- Court heatmaps
Tactics & Strategy
- Court geometry
- Shot charts
The Mental Game
- Point-by-point data
- Match studies
The Athlete
- Physiology charts
- Training data
The Practice Court
- Session plans
- Drill diagrams
The Arena
The court, the conditions, the formats — the world the game happens in.
Surfaces & Conditions
- Bounce data
- Surface stats
Doubles
- Formation diagrams
- Court maps
The Game Itself
- Rule diagrams
- Score trees
The Record
The data and the history — the proof behind the eye test.
The Numbers — Analytics & Data
- Match data
- Interactive models
The Champions
- Historic data
- Head-to-heads
The Minds — Coaches & Analysts
- Case studies
How Tennis Got Here
- Historic data
- Timelines
Dominating Tennis
Tennis, taken apart
Watch a forehand closely and it stops being one motion. It is three machines working in sequence — a tool, a body, and the air it moves through. This is all of it, slowed right down and pulled apart.
01 — The tool
Built to obey
A hoop, a strung membrane, a throat, a handle balanced to the gram. Nothing here is decoration — every part exists to send the ball exactly where the hand intends. Watch it come together.
02 — The body
Power starts at the floor
Never the arm. The force builds from the ground up — legs, hips, trunk, shoulder, the late snap of the wrist — each link handing its speed to the next. This is real motion capture of that chain unwinding.
03 — The strike
Four milliseconds
Everything the body built exists for this: the strings on the ball for about four thousandths of a second, brushing up the back of it. The swing ends here. The flight begins.
04 — The air
It leaves with spin
Brushed from below, the ball climbs away spinning forward. Ride along in its frame and the air arrives head-on — then splits, doing one thing over the top and the opposite beneath.
04 — The air
The air pushes back
Spin pulls the flow faster underneath and slower over the top. Fast air is low pressure; slow air is high. The ball is pressed down by the very wind it makes — topspin, written as a force.
The whole game
Where power becomes control
Hit flat and a ball this hard flies long. Add spin and the same swing drops it in. That trade — pace for safety, dialed in by the wrist — is the whole game. Take the slider and find it.
The author
I started this because tennis is full of things everyone repeats and almost no one can show you — use your legs, brush up the ball, let the racquet lag. I wanted to see the actual mechanism, so I pulled real match footage apart frame by frame until the swing stopped being advice and became physics you can drag. Every champion I've admired turned out to be a solved problem wearing a beautiful solution. This is my attempt to hand you the solutions — one blueprint at a time.
— Felipe
Every swing on this site is real — traced from professional match footage, tracked frame by frame into a blueprint.