Silliness of Racquet Selectors

In general, I love Tennis Warehouse. They have a huge supply of racquets and other accessories (could do better with their variety of vibration dampeners, but I digress). They have a great forum where many people participate.

The one thing that's totally bogus is selecting a racquet. The reason? This is a mistake people make all the time. They pick the parameters that are easy for them to make a decision on, but is otherwise useless to the average person picking a racquet.

For example, they want you to specify the racquet length, width, weight, and balance. That's not how people pick racquets. They think "I want to serve like Roddick, hit groundstrokes like Nadal, volley like Federer, what racquet do you have that does all that?". They have no idea how to translate all that into something you can put data in for. Do you think the average person knows what weight they want for a racquet? How it should be balanced?

It should be like going to an ophthalmologist, except there are lots of variables to tweak. While the ophthalmologist has easy ways to modify variables, it's hard for someone to pick racquets this way, even if the variable is, say, racquet type.

The reason the racquet selector is picked that way is because they have numbers for those things. Thus, you can write a program or some simple database query to get what you want. But the results are meaningless.

One problem is that one size doesn't fit all. A racquet that feels like a great serving racquet to one person might feel off to another. One person might say a racquet is too light while another says it's too heavy. The problem is the average person has no convenient way to find what they like, and so they have no convenient way to use these selectors to do anything.

Fortunately, places like Tennis Warehouse have alternatives. They both have customer reviews and a forum where players discuss these things, so from that, you can at least make an educated guess (short of getting a loaner) of what you want.