Earlier this week on Blender Today Live, it was revealed that there has been some work done in the Blender master (version 2.79.2 find the latest builds here).

These new improvements pertain to the children particles, in which you can now play with a new parameter under 'Simple' called Twist. It does what you would think, it twists the hair particles; almost too easily. It's a nice addition to have, especially when I was working on the 'fuzz' for this tennis ball. My earlier attempts struggled to get the right amount of volume, the twist parameter helped spiral fibers quite easily, AND, you can control which direction the strands are spiraling via texture mapping! So cool!

You can find that video by Pablo Vazquez here (you'll want to skip 30 mins in to find the related parts)

To be quite honest, I didn't even know about the new hair improvements until I saw the video, but I had already begun working on the tennis ball, as it was my second installment of the 'sports series' I am working on for my daily passion projects. The tennis ball just so happened to be a lucky coincidence. Either way, you can see how successful it was. Here you can swipe between the non-hair version and the hair version...obviously just to show how robust that type of effect can be for realism.