In 2017, Ramsey started playing pickleball. A year later, he watched it on television for the first time. It was a CBS Sports broadcast of the 2018 US Open. Gold medal matches shown on tape delay — days after the results were public. Pickleball fans didn't care. Some of them like Ramsey watched it over and over again in slow motion.
He had questions. How long was the longest rally? What was the average number of shots per rally? When a team sped up the ball, how often did they win the point? What even counted as a winner in pickleball? What was an unforced error?
Nobody had answers. So he took out a ruler and a pencil and started counting.
One of Jim’s original charting templates. Before you can count anything, you have to decide what’s worth counting.
A completed charting sheet from a professional match. Hundreds of individual decisions distilled to tally marks, categories, and questions.
In 2003, Michael Lewis published Moneyball. It wasn’t really a book about baseball. It was a book about what happens when somebody looks at an old game differently. The book became a film. The film accelerated an evisceration of every sacred cow in professional sport, one league at a time.
Jim Ramsey watched it happen up close. He spent almost three decades as a sports producer for NBC. Baseball. Basketball. Football. When the analytics revolution arrived, he followed it obsessively — every new paper, every new framework, every argument about what the numbers did and didn't mean.
He posted his findings to pickleball discussion groups, careful not to make any big claims. He knew what he had was limited. But for a certain kind of pickleball player, it was exactly what they'd been waiting for. The discussion group he started for pickleball stats blew up with followers with similar questions. Among them: professional players tracking their own tendencies. One of the forum members would go on to run the PPA — and eventually offer Ramsey a job as their head statistician.
Ramsey still watches gold medal matches on Sunday afternoons. Still uses paper and pencil. One of the most data-rich sports organizations in pickleball, and the person feeding it information is doing it by hand — the same way he did when no one was paying attention.
The tools are rapidly changing. AI can chart entire matches in real time. Broadcast graphics will tell you shot speed and placement and rally length before you've processed what you just watched.
But Ramsey figured something out early that the technology hasn't made obsolete: you have to slow the game down and look. Really look.
Before you can measure anything, you have to decide what's worth measuring?
That question — what's worth measuring? — is still mostly unanswered in pickleball. Which means we're still near the beginning.
The finished product. Match statistics, rally analysis, shot distributions, and handwritten notes covering nearly every inch of the page.