Tennis players rely on YouTube to scout opponents before matches

NEW YORK — Players know some opponents well, and for everyone else there’s YouTube.

At least that was the case at the U.S. Open for French player Kristina Mladenovic, who reached the fourth round with a win Friday over Russia’s Daria Kasatkina. Mladenovic had never played Kasatkina, ranked 133rd in the world, and knew little about her.

“Thanks to YouTube I could see at least how she looked,” Mladenovic joked.

She’s serious though about using YouTube to help her game. Mladenovic heard Kasatkina was a young and talented player who’d won a junior Slam title and knew she won two matches against good players to reach the third round.

“Nobody knew a lot about my opponent,” she said. “It’s very rare to have this situation in the third round of a Slam … And of course you try to look at YouTube.” She says she found only three videos of Kasatkina, and they were on clay, but they helped.

Mladenovic uses YouTube a lot. She watches videos to see how players have improved, what weapons they have and how they react in key moments.

Certainly there’s a lot out there. Search ‘Tennis’ and you’ll get nearly 4 million results.

Retired player Jim Courier, a former world No. 1 and winner of four Grand Slam titles, uses YouTube frequently as a tennis commentator and U.S. Davis Cup captain. He’s sure most players today use it.

“You really would be missing out if you didn’t,” Courier said. “It would be unprofessional not to use YouTube to your advantage these days.”

Courier wishes it had been around when he was playing on the ATP tour. He spoke of all the new players “coming and going” who he didn’t have a chance to watch before playing.

“Then you’re relying on the guys in the locker room for a lot of your information, but if you can see the way they strike the ball it’s a different deal than having to figure it out in real time,” he said.

YouTube can be handy even when the opponent is a superstar. Said Andrea Petkovic before playing Serena Williams last month: “I will grab my best friend YouTube.com and look at some of her recent matches, and my coach obviously as well.”

A YouTube search for “Serena Williams” yields 128,000 videos.

YouTube was founded in 2005, three years after retired tennis player Dinara Safina, also a former world No. 1, started playing. It was around for part of her career, but she didn’t use it much. Since June she’s been working with the Russian Tennis Federation and advising four juniors. She still doesn’t rely on it.

“I always prefer to watch my players in real life,” Safina said. “Because it’s different. When you watch live you can hear the sound of the ball, the speed of the ball. When you see on TV or YouTube you can’t hear the same sound.”

Retired player Tatiana Golovin, who now does TV commentary, started using YouTube more as she realized the importance of learning from her own matches and those of others. These days she occasionally gets a kick out of watching her old matches on the web site.

“You have actually people who bring out the best of your points and the your best matches -- it’s always good for your confidence to look at it,” she says, laughing.

But Golovin too can think of downsides to YouTube: “It’s super dangerous because you can spend your whole afternoon on the computer. There’s one link and another link, then you end up spending your whole day on the Internet.”

PHOTOS: Early action at U.S. Open