Racquet Testing

I haven't play-tested racquets in maybe ten years. RnJ Sports in Rockville, however, loans out a good set of racquets for 3 dollars each, which can be reimbursed for the cost of a racquet. The main problem with RnJ is that they only carry three brands of racquets: Head, Wilson, and Prince. Undoubtedly, these are the three big companies in racquets.

However, there's now a few other brands out there that deserve note, but I can understand how a place that primarily specializes in running, and then does tennis as an afterthought (though not a trivial underthought-what they do, they do pretty well).

In particular, there are a few new brands out there that were nowhere, but now are somewhat recognizable. In particular, Babolat, which had, for years, made strings, has now gone into the racquet making business. This isn't so weird. Technifibre is another company that makes strings, but now also makes racquets. And, look at Prince, which used to make tennis ball machines, or Rossignol, which used to make skis (Rossignol doesn't seem to make racquets anymore).

Some companies have gone by the wayside. Slazenger is no longer around. They probably couldn't make the transition to non-wood racquets. Tennis Warehouse, a large tennis racquet company, sells Avery, Boris Becker, Fischer, Vokyl, ProKennex, Dunlop, Donnay, and Yonex racquets.

My current racquet is a Yonex RDS-003, which is red, midplus racquet, which is a hair over 11 ounces. It's a decent racquet and I like it, but I want to try out a new racquets out.

The main racquet I wanted to try was the KSix-One 95, which is somewhat bigger than the one Federer uses, and a bit lighter.

Ah, let me go through a bit of tennis racquet history. The original racquets were wooden. They were all uniformly about 66 square inches. When oversized racquets came out, they were 110 square inches. Prince was the first to popularize these racquets, and Pam Shriver, the first player to make a splash with an oversized racquet.

Most pros found, at the time, difficulty adjusting to the huge racquets. They weren't used to the power. Racquet companies started making midsize racquets, most of them around 85 square inches, or some 30% larger than the old ones. Lendl grew up using the original sizes, so his racquet was a modest 72 square inches.

But the midsizes weren't that much more powerful than the oversized, so racquet sizes started getting bigger. Racquets started creeping towards 95 to 100 square inches, and were titled mid-plus racquets.

However, many pros learned to play with one of the most popular racquets Wilson ever made: the Wilson Pro Staff Graphite. It was about 85 square inches, which was typical of midsized racquets. In particular, Pete Sampras and Stefan Edberg used this racquet, and for that matter, so did Roger Federer.

The other huge innovation that came out in the late 80s was the Profile racquet, called widebodies. Nearly every company created a widebody racquet. Here's the unusual thing. They're almost all gone. Maybe a racquet is a hair wider than it used to be. Dunno.

So anyway, I tried (I think) the Ozone Pro Tour MP, which is an orange-ish racquet. I didn't like the feel of the racquet. It felt a bit light (even though it was at least 11 ounces or more) and more like a metal racquet. I also tried the racquet that was a bit larger than Federer's. It was good to serve, was decent on the forehand, nice for slicing, but not easy to get power on the topspin, and the grip was a bit short for a two-handed shot. Nice, but I'm not sure I'd switch to it.

So two racquets down. Might try a few more.