Assuming that Serena Williams was on course to win the US Open on September 12, 2015—her 22nd major title and fifth in a row — I decided in advance to create as big a data experience as possible about her. So, I sent a message (included below) to Jeff Sackmann, founder of the tennis analytics database Tennis Abstract, to get some help gathering the necessary data.

“I noticed tennis abstract does not have match stats for women.”

I definitely couldn’t rely on the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) website. Its statistics — which only cover the bare minimum of indicators, for only the top 10 ranked players, and not even to the level of individual match data — are locked in PDFs. At first, Sackmann didn’t have any of Serena’s statistics either, but he emailed me the next day with enough to cover 506 of her matches. It wasn’t everything—much of her early career data seems long gone—but together with detailed statistics from a crowdsourced tennis data collection initiative called The Match Charting Project (MCP), which Sackmann also founded, there was finally enough to tell a good part of her story.

With the incredible amount of technology available for gathering data from tennis matches these days, you’d think it would be at the forefront of sports analytics. Sadly, this is not the case. Most data is kept under lock and key, and selectively presented in a watered-down format to enhance the “fan experience” for spectators at home. According to Stephanie Kolvachik, a researcher for Tennis Australia’s Game Insight Group, “the ‘siloing’ of data is a problem all sports are facing.” She noted also that with the success of data science comes more opportunities for commercialization and, therefore, a closed-door policy on collected data for those unwilling to pay the entrance fee.

Charles Allen — creator of the analytics site Tennis Visuals and advocate for open data — found this out for himself. He’s the father of two boys immersed in the world of European youth tennis tournaments. It’s a place where data should support player development, but it rarely makes an appearance. To help his kids, Allen charted his sons’ matches via the ProTracker Tennis app, but he couldn’t share the results conveniently. He used this as an opportunity to learn how to visualize interactive data.

He told me that some of the top coaches he knows — with all this technology at their disposal — never use it, because they don’t have the time or support systems to acquire and deconstruct the data. “I’d like to see the barriers to technology use lowered, to see the ease of use and accessibility improve,” he said. As innovation and technology accelerate, most companies choose to create “closed ecosystems,” but Allen believes there are “passionate individuals who ‘get it’ and will make a dent one way or another.”