Tennis Smash: a free Garmin scoreboard for tennis without an umpire

Watch any club match closely and you will see a small ritual before most points. The server pauses, looks across the net and says the score out loud. It is not only good manners. The Code, the USTA's guide for matches played without officials, asks the server to announce the game score before the first point of a game and the point score before every point after that. Most tennis is played on an honour system, and the score is the first thing that system has to get right.

It is also the first thing to go missing. After a long rally, a disputed line call or a set that has stretched past the hour, two players can sincerely remember different scores. Usually the disagreement ends politely with a replayed point. Sometimes it does not.

Tennis Smash takes the score out of the players' heads and puts it on a wrist. It is a free app for Garmin watches, made by Multipassionate, an independent studio in Utrecht, the Netherlands. It has passed a thousand downloads on Garmin's Connect IQ Store, where it held a 4.8 out of 5 rating from 36 reviews in October 2026.

What Tennis Smash does

Tennis Smash is a Connect IQ watch app that keeps the score of a tennis match point by point. The player presses one button after each point, Down when they win it and Up when the opponent does, and the watch does the rest: games, sets, tie-breaks, the deuce rule, who serves next and from which side. When the match ends, it is saved to Garmin Connect as a tennis activity with the score and serve statistics attached.

Three things define its scope:

• It is free. At the time of writing it costs nothing in the Connect IQ Store, with no account, sign-up or trial period.
• It runs on older watches. More than 100 Garmin models are supported, including several that have no Tennis activity of their own, such as the Forerunner 55 and 245, the vívoactive 4 and the original Venu and Venu Sq.
• It keeps score; it does not detect strokes. Every point is entered by a person.

An optional live scoreboard at tennissmash.app lets anyone with a six-digit PIN follow the match on a phone, with each point read aloud.

Three answers to deuce

Tennis has one traditional answer to 40-40, advantage until a player wins two points in a row, and several modern alternatives. Tennis Smash ships three of them:

The rule lives in a Scoring menu and can be changed in the middle of a match, which matters more than it sounds. Club doubles often starts with advantages and switches to No-Ad when the court booking is running out, and the watch follows without anyone restarting anything.

Tie-breaks, and the serve order nobody remembers

The tie-break is the most technically demanding part of tennis scoring. The player whose turn it is serves the first point from the deuce court. After that, the serve alternates every two points, and each server starts their pair of points from the ad court. The players change ends after every six points, and the player who served first in the tie-break receives first in the next set. Few club players can recite all of that, and fewer can track it while also trying to win the points.

Tennis Smash handles it automatically, including:

• a 7-point tie-break at 6-6, which can be switched off for advantage sets,
• a 10-point Super Tie-Break in place of the deciding set, the format many leagues use to keep matches inside a court booking, and
• match lengths of best of three sets, best of five, or Unlimited for practice sessions where the sets simply keep coming.

A mini court on the watch shows who is serving and from which side. The logic behind it is simple once written down: when an even number of points has been played in the game, the server stands in the deuce court, and when the number is odd, in the ad court. The point of the mini court is that nobody has to count.

A press, a tap or a swipe

Undo goes back 15 points, statistics included. Holding Up changes the server at any time, which fixes the common mistake of starting a match with the wrong player serving. Touch can be switched off on the match screen to avoid accidental taps during fast rallies, while menus still respond to it. And if the app closes during a match, the next launch offers to continue it; at worst, the points of the game in progress are lost.

The court on the screen can be recoloured from Classic Blue to Clay Red or Grass Green, and a heart-rate gauge coloured by training zone wraps around the edge. Small touches, but on a watch you glance at between points, the right surface colour makes the screen read as a court in a fraction of a second.

What ends up in Garmin Connect

A finished match becomes a Tennis activity in Garmin Connect on watches that support the sport type. On older watches without a Tennis type it arrives as a generic activity with the same score and statistics, and the activity type can be changed to Tennis in Garmin Connect afterwards.

Each activity carries:

• the winner and every set score,
• the share of points won on serve and on return,
• one lap per set, with points won serving and returning, and
• heart rate and time, from the wrist sensor or a paired chest strap.

The serve and return percentages are the two numbers that explain most tennis results. Because a player serves roughly half the points in a match, adding them gives a quick read: a total above 100 usually means more points won than lost. Followed set by set, they show where a match turned. A player whose service percentage holds steady while the return percentage collapses in the third set has a different problem from one whose own serve fell apart.

GPS tracking is a setting of its own. It is on by default, but a wrist GPS position can wander by several metres, which on a tennis court is roughly the distance a player covers between shots. The distance it records is therefore rough at best, and Tennis Smash's own help centre suggests switching GPS off unless the location or a map of the session is wanted. Switching it off also saves battery during long matches. The research behind that advice is in the guide GPS on or off for tennis.

The match, for everyone outside the fence

Tennis is a strange spectator sport at club level. The people who care about a match, a partner at home or a teammate waiting for the next court, usually cannot see it, and the players are too busy to text the score.

Tennis Smash's live scoreboard fills that gap. Live Broadcast is switched on from the watch's settings; it is off by default. The watch then shows a six-digit PIN and can open the scoreboard on the player's own phone. Anyone else enters the same PIN at tennissmash.app. With Sound and Screen On switched on, the page announces every point in a choice of languages and voices, and the score updates moments after each press on the watch.

The data that leaves the watch is limited to the match itself. Tennis Smash's technical summary lists what is sent (the scores, the match settings, the serving side, the device language and the random PIN) and what is never sent: heart rate, GPS location, a name, an email address or a Garmin account ID.

What it does not do

Tennis Smash is a scoreboard with statistics, not an analysis tool, and its limits follow from that:

• No stroke or shot detection. It does not count forehands or measure swing speed.
• No player names on the watch. The sides are YOU and OPPONENT, though names can be typed into the live scoreboard, which then calls games and sets by name.
• Doubles, side against side. It follows which side serves, not which partner.
• Short memory on the watch. The last 10 matches stay on the watch; Garmin Connect keeps every one.

Players who want stroke counts or point tagging have other options in the Connect IQ Store, and Tennis Smash's site publishes an unusually candid comparison of Garmin tennis apps, including the ones that do things it does not.

A link to a coach

Besides Launch on Phone, one item in the Tennis Smash menu leads off the watch: Fitness Coach. It opens Smash Coach on the phone, Multipassionate's training platform, with an onboarding flow for tennis players; the coaching itself is part of the Smash Coach Pro subscription, after a two-week free trial. Smash Coach plans strength, conditioning and injury-prevention work around the sports a player already does, and its long read on combining HYROX training with tennis shows how it thinks about a sport built on pauses. The article on Smash Coach covers the platform itself.

What to look for in a tennis scoring app

A tennis scoreboard on the wrist has to earn its place: if it costs more attention than remembering the score, players stop using it by the second set. These are the questions worth asking of any Garmin tennis app, with Tennis Smash's answers.

Four ways players use it

The league doubles pair. Their league plays No-Ad games and a 10-point match tie-break instead of a third set. One partner wears the watch, the rule is set once, and the serve order through the tie-break, the moment club doubles most often goes wrong, is the watch's problem rather than theirs.

The junior and the parent. A teenager plays a club match; a parent who cannot get there follows it point by point from home on tennissmash.app with the PIN, and hears each point read aloud. Afterwards, the set scores and serve figures are already in Garmin Connect for the conversation in the car.

The coach running match play. In practice sets on Unlimited format, a coach can compare serve and return percentages set by set across a session, which shows whether a player's level holds up or drops as fatigue builds.

The owner of an older Garmin. A Forerunner 245 has no Tennis activity. Tennis Smash keeps the score anyway and saves the match with all its statistics, and one change of activity type in Garmin Connect files it under tennis.

It is not the right tool for someone who mainly wants stroke counts or swing analytics, or for anyone without a Garmin.

The rest of the Smash family

Tennis Smash shares its controls and its live scoreboard with Multipassionate's other court apps: Padel Smash, Pickleball Smash, Badminton Smash and Ping Pong Smash. A player who switches from tennis on Saturday to padel on Tuesday presses the same buttons for the same things. The studio also makes Hybrid Smash for HYROX-style racing and the Moon Analogue watch face.

Tennis Smash is available from its Connect IQ Store listing, with help, guides and the live scoreboard at tennissmash.app.