Tennis pieces that don't slot neatly into strings, racquets, buying guides, or pro setups — broader explainers, industry notes, and gear we tested once. Browse here, or head back to the main sections in the nav above.
Walk onto any club court and you will hear the serve described as a stack of non-negotiables: feet here, toss there, racquet down the back, snap up and out.
Ask ten club players what wrecks their serve under pressure and most will point at the same thing: the toss.
Every junior who has ever shanked a forehand on a big point has heard the same sentence from the fence: "Just relax out there." It is the most repeated instruction in the sport.
The first live match I watched without anyone explaining it to me ended with a number I could not parse. The scoreboard read 7-6, and beneath the 6 sat a small superscript 3. I assumed it was a typo.
There is a number that keeps surfacing in the sport-participation research, and it is worth sitting with before you pay for any membership that promises to connect you with other players.
There is one fact that quietly solves most of this problem: tennis is a sport of things that wear out. Strings break. Grips go slick. Balls go dead.
Walk into any sporting-goods aisle or scroll a supplier catalog and the tennis nets all blur into the same black mesh rectangle. That sameness is the trap.
A few weeks ago I dropped a tape measure on the center strap of a public court I'd played for years. The reading was 35 inches — an inch low.
The pitch behind most tennis gift guides is that the woman in your life already owns everything, so you have to find something rare, clever, or expensive to impress her.
The most decisive number on a tennis ball machine's spec sheet is not the one the marketing leads with.
The first thing we did was stop reading the brochure and pull the number. Nike positions the Air Zoom GP Turbo as a shoe built for aggressive court movers — the marketing leans on Frances Tiafoe's…
Here is a question almost every competitive amateur has asked themselves, usually mid-match, usually after something annoying just happened: at what point does following the rules stop being enough to…