Guides / Start here

Your first Weekly Review

Open it with your athlete on Sunday, let them find the one record they set, celebrate it, and close the app. That is the whole habit. The review is a campfire, not a courtroom. The numbers below arrive as the logging and match tracking add up.

Where it is

The Week tab. It reads from the sessions you logged and the matches you tracked; nothing here is a survey. If the first week has two sessions in it, the review has two sessions in it, and that is a true week.

What the first one shows

• Days won against the days-a-week number you set, and the streak.
• Hours by category: tennis, physical, mental.
• Worked on: which skills got the most attention this week. Three weeks of this and "we never practice the serve" becomes a fact instead of an argument.
• Personal records: longest streak, best quality week, most mental sessions in a week, biggest deliberate block. The first week sets all of them; every later week gets to beat one.

You vs your former self

Comparisons in TierBreak run in exactly one direction: backward at yourself. This week beside last week; this month's streak beside your best ever. The chart has one line on it because that is the only line that matters. No other athlete ever appears.

As the record grows

Match numbers

Once matches are tracked, the review and the match pages start answering tennis questions: first-serve percentage, break points won and saved, serve and return points won. With the return switch on, the return matrix fills in: forehand and backhand, deuce side and ad side, and how each return went. It turns "the return's been off" into "backhand returns on the ad side, and only there." Give it a few tracked matches before you read it.

The Proof, inside the Mental Pathway

Once the athlete has started the Mental Pathway, a screen called The Proof computes three things from real tracked points: error recovery (how often they win the very next point after one of their own errors), big points (win rate on break, game, set, and match points beside neutral points), and fresh-set starts (the first four points of each set). Once there is data on both sides, each splits around the day the Pathway started, so the question "did the mental work change the match data?" gets an answer from the matches rather than from anyone's opinion. Focus-game personal bests and trends live there too.

Honest caveats

• Small samples lie. Where there is not enough data the app says so instead of pretending; respect it.
• One bad tournament moves nothing. Seasons move things.
• The review is only as good as the logging. Tuesday's session has to be written down on Tuesday.

TierBreak is free on the App Store, on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Want to work directly with the founder? Ask for an Inner Circle place.

Next: Goals & the three clocks → No match tracked yet? Track your first match first. Parents: what to say in the car.