Summer of Tennis - Heat Maps

Heat Maps for some reason often invoke a 'wow!' Some research needs to be done on the why that is the case. But, if you check the topic on Google Trends, you can see the following:

I've also been really fascinated on the single visual that explains so much spatially. I had an opportunity to create one, when I was tasked with plotting all hits and bounces for each player in a match on the tennis court.
For the ease of understanding, I aligned all hits to one side of the court and shots to the other. This allowed the user to compare among different players with ease too. Since the points are a lot, it made sense to convert these short charts into hex density charts.
A very useful resource in this case was the below Tableau article on Hex bin Density Map.

Since this data is proprietary to the USTA, I cannot post the actual visualization to the public domain, so attaching pictures of my work, below:

Here you can see the following salient features:

• Selection of multiple matches based on the player, allowed the user to aggregate the maps based on different matches.
• The court was subdivided into 16 quadrants on each side (hit and bounce), this was used to calculate and make a numerical comparison of different sections on the player reach and shot directions.
• These were of course interactive to highlight the selection from the bar chart below.