Match charting is the foundation of CourtSide. This is the full picture of how it works, why we made each choice, and why it's deliberately not built like every other charting app — because you're not an analyst scoring two strangers. You're a parent in the stands, watching your own child.
"Let your eyes look directly forward, and your gaze be straight before you. Ponder the path of your feet; then all your ways will be sure." — Proverbs 4:25–26
Every other tennis charting app is symmetric. There are two players, treated as equals — "Player 1" and "Player 2" — and you assign each shot to whoever hit it. That's the correct design for a coach scouting both sides, or a ranking system, or an analyst. It is the wrong design for a parent.
A parent isn't refereeing a contest between strangers. You have one child you care about, one phone, usually one free hand, and one goal: help my kid get better. So CourtSide flips the whole model around a single anchor.
Your child is "the player." The person across the net is "the opponent." Every screen, every button, every stat is organized around what your child did. You never think in "Player 1 / Player 2." You follow one path — your own child's.
"A forehand winner was hit." → you decide which of two equal players gets it. Neutral. Built for analyzing a matchup.
"What did Joven do this point?" → the question, and the answer, always center on your child. Built for developing one player.
You're charting live, often nervous, sometimes one-handed. So charting has four depths, and you can switch between them mid-match. Tap as little or as much as the moment allows.
Here's the heart of it. After every point you answer one question — "Who won this point?" — and then the app asks the only thing that matters for development: "What was your child's role in it?" There are exactly six ways a point can end, and for each one we capture the piece that teaches you something about your kid.
| What happened | What CourtSide records (and why) |
|---|---|
| Your child hits a winner | His winning shot + direction. His weapon — how he ends points on his own terms. |
| Your child forces the error (he wins) | His forcing shot + direction, and the opponent's error wing. The aggressive shot that broke the opponent down — see below, this is the big one. |
| Opponent gives it away (their unforced error / double fault) | Just the outcome — a free point. Your child didn't do anything to learn from, so we don't make you tap detail you don't have. |
| Your child's unforced error (he loses) | His shot, direction, and how it missed (net/long/wide/shank). His own mistakes are the #1 thing to work on. |
| Your child's forced error (he loses) | His shot + direction, and the opponent's forcing shot. What beats him — his defensive exposure. |
| Opponent is too good (their winner / ace) | The opponent's winning shot. That's the record of how your child got beaten. |
This is the change that matters most, and it's the clearest example of the parent's lens in action. Picture it: Joven crushes a heavy forehand, the opponent stretches wide and nets the reply. Joven won that point — with his forehand. He earned it.
But a normal charting app records it as the opponent's error, on the opponent's racket, and throws Joven's forehand away entirely. The shot that actually won the point vanishes from your child's record. That's backwards for a parent.
A forced error is your child's offensive achievement, not just the opponent's failure. So when your child forces the error, we record your child's forcing shot — the weapon that did the work — right alongside the opponent's miss.
It works both ways. When your child gets forced into an error, we record his shot under pressure and what the opponent hit to force it — so you learn what beats him, not just that he missed.
The best junior baseliners run around their backhand to hit a forehand instead. It's a tell — it means the player is aggressively looking for his weapon. A plain "forehand, cross-court" can't capture that the kid moved his feet to make it happen.
So on a forehand, the direction choice isn't three options — it's five:
Inside-out and inside-in are forehands hit after running around the backhand — one captures direction and footwork in a single tap.
The single most confusing moment in charting is "wait — whose error was that?" We removed the guesswork entirely: every prompt says the name out loud.
"Unforced Error"
"Winner"
"What shot?"
Whose? You're left to remember.
"Joven's Unforced Error"
"Stellan's Winner"
"What did Joven hit to force it?"
You always know whose shot you're logging.
Forced error versus unforced error is the most subjective judgment in tennis. We thought hard about softening it with friendlier words. We decided against it: the families CourtSide is built for already speak this language fluently, and dumbing it down would insult them.
You make the forced/unforced call — that's the parent's job, and you're qualified to make it. We keep the standard tennis terms and teach the nuance in onboarding, rather than inventing watered-down words a tennis family would never use.
Here's the same Joven vs. Stellan match (6–3, 6–3 win) read back as a parent's development conversation — every line is something you can act on:
A normal charting app would hand you a neutral box score of two players. CourtSide hands you your son's game — what's working, what's a weapon, and what to work on Monday.
The forcing-shot and run-around-forehand numbers are brand new, and right now they live on the individual match summary only. We have deliberately not rolled them into the season-long Trends view or fed them to AI Reflect yet.
CourtSide charts a match the way a parent actually watches one: one child at the center, every tap telling you something about them, the opponent kept only as context. Start with one tap, go as deep as you like, and never lose track of whose shot you just recorded. That's the foundation — and it's deliberately unlike any charting app built for someone other than a parent.