Specs that matter, specs that don't, and the customisations tour players actually make to stock frames.
The racquet Roger Federer sold you was never the racquet Roger Federer played. That is not a scandal.
The number that matters is 300 grams. That is the unstrung weight Babolat lists for the standard Pure Drive Gen 11, and it is the exact same figure the company publishes for the Wimbledon edition of…
There are, by the USRSA's own accounting, only a few thousand people who hold the Master Racquet Technician certification worldwide.
There is a tennis racquet you are not allowed to hit a ball with. It is set with more than 1,700 diamonds, it was valued at roughly $1.3 million, and for a few years in the early 2000s it sat in a…
The advice is everywhere, and it sounds reasonable. Want a better racquet? Buy the one your favorite pro plays.
You will hear a number thrown around in lessons and on YouTube: that most of a serve's pace comes from "snapping the wrist." It is a tidy claim.
Search "trophy position" and you get a wall of nearly identical photographs: a player frozen mid-serve, tossing arm pointing at the ball, racquet arm cocked back like a statue on a tournament trophy.
You have probably stood in a pro shop, or hovered over a checkout page, and asked yourself the same thing every Federer fan eventually asks: if I buy the exact racquet he played, do I get any of what…
Here is the claim, stated plainly so we can spend the rest of the piece earning the right to have said it: if you have tennis elbow, parking your arm in a sling and waiting for it to feel better is…
Here is a claim we will spend the rest of this piece earning: for most baseline players, the racquet spec that decides whether you like a frame is one almost nobody quotes on a product page.
A salesperson once told one of our editors that the racquet in his hand was "the most powerful frame on the market." The next salesperson, a week later, said the same thing about a different racquet.
There is a sentence that ends most arguments about tennis history and starts most of the bad ones: "Just count the majors." Whoever holds the most Grand Slam singles titles is the greatest, the…