WIMBLEDON, England – Keith Sohl has some advice for Tim Henman.

Sohl is no tennis legend, not even an obscure guru of groundstroke technique. His backhand, by his own admission, is average at best. As the chief consultant on IBM’s Wimbledon team, however, Sohl has a lot of data on his hands, and he gladly makes it available to anyone who asks for it – though few people do.

If Henman were to ask, he might reach the following conclusion: Next time Dmitry Tursunov is across the net, he should not hit every second serve to his backhand on the ad court. Against Tursunov, who defeated Henman in five sets in the second round last week, the Brit put 18 second serves in play to the ad court, 16 of them to the backhand. He won seven (44%) of those points. Henman won one of two ad-court second serves played to Tursunov’s forehand. On the deuce court, he won 13 of 18 (72%) second serves to the forehand, and only two of seven to the backhand (29%). Perhaps he should have tested the forehand a bit more.

Helpful as this sort of statistical breakdown might be, Henman is unlikely to make much use of it. Indeed, Sohl can only remember one tennis professional who has ever asked to meet with him about such data: Tim Gullickson, the coach of Wimbledon legend Pete Sampras.

Gullickson, who died of brain cancer in 1996, called upon Sohl in 1994, just prior to Sampras’s final against Goran Ivanisevic. What became apparent was that Ivanisevic made more unforced errors on his backhand volley. A small point, and something one guesses Gullickson had suspected in the first place. More important, with or without data, Pete was Pete, and he won 7-6(2), 7-6(5), 6-0.

Still, if this information was useful to Gullickson, one can only wonder why more coaches and players are not poring over statistical reports, especially at Wimbledon, the only Grand Slam for which IBM – in this case, its U.K. division – has designed special software to increase the amount of data it can record. Want to know where a player served, and how fast, on any point in any match? Done. Want to know how many strokes were hit in a particularly tense rally? No problem. Want to know if a player likes to serve wide, at the body, or down the center line? It’s all there for the taking.

Each match at the All England Club, no matter the court, has at least one data spy watching closely. All of them are junior players with national rankings who understand the difference between a forced and an unforced error, and – after two days of training – know how to record them in a Palm Pilot. Slightly abbreviated versions of this information are delivered to the press, while more detailed reports, including blow-by-blow accounts of matches, are compiled for the players.

Sohl is shy about offering tips; approaching a player is just not something he would even consider. He says players and coaches will call up IBM if they do not receive a match report, which he takes as a good sign. But they certainly are not clamoring for the data, either. Tennis is only now laying the groundwork for a statistical revolution, and the advanced study of in-game data is perhaps as far along as baseball statheads were 15 years ago.

“It’s a good tool,” said Jose Higueras, Jim Courier’s former coach. Higueras had just finished eating lunch on Saturday with Tursunov, his part-time pupil for the last year. “It’s not like I use them to the limit, but sometimes I like to look at them, more for the players I am helping than the opponent. But sometimes the reports can be misleading.”

For example, Higueras said, a report that suggests a player commits a lot of backhand errors does not – at least not yet – explain whether those errors are in response to low, high, slow, or fast returns from an opponent. “You have to know a player’s tendencies, too,” Higueras said.

Yet implicit in Higueras’s argument is the notion that one should not rely solely on the observations of the human eye and mind, which throughout history have collaborated on some of the world’s most incomplete, if not stupendously inaccurate, conclusions.

A small example from this weekend’s tennis was Andy Roddick’s five set victory over Italy’s Daniele Bracciali. For anyone who watched that match – this observer included – it seemed obvious why Roddick won. The American served and volleyed 14 times in the fifth set, winning 13 of those points. Prior to that, he had done it just once, in the second set. He lost that point. What could be simpler than that? We all saw it, and Roddick even said afterward that he had to change his strategy because Bracciali was killing him off the baseline. Game, set, match.

But a closer look at Roddick’s match report, provided by Sohl, reveals another more subtle tactic that likely helped Roddick’s cause just as much, if not more so. After evenly varying his serve placement in the first three sets, Roddick began serving more to Bracciali’s backhand in the fourth set (66%). In the fifth set, he served there almost exclusively: Of the 27 serves he put in play, 25 went to Bracciali’s backhand (93%). Ten of the 25 were either aces or service winners, and of the remaining 15 that Bracciali put in play, the Italian won only four points. Of the two serves Roddick played to Bracciali’s forehand, one was a service winner; Bracciali returned the other one and won the point.

If Roddick had noticed that Bracciali’s forehand return improved considerably in the third and fourth sets, he was certainly not talking about it after the match. Left to rely on Roddick’s words and our eyes, we failed to notice the more drastic of two significant adjustments – Roddick’s incredible reliance on serving to Bracciali’s backhand. Meanwhile, his tendency to serve and volley was apparent to everyone: Even the least astute of observers could not fail to notice a man running to the net over and over again. Both tactics played a part in Roddick’s escape, yet only one was credited.

“I’d love to see this done at all the Grand Slams so we could really understand the game,” Sohl said.

Until then, at least we have Wimbledon, where plenty more of the game’s secrets are there for the uncovering.