If you watch Bencic redirect a 130 km/h serve down the line off a half-step, the question that surfaces — the one club players keep asking us — is whether the racquet she's holding is doing anything unusual, or whether it's the same EZONE 98 sitting on the demo rack at your local shop. The honest answer is: closer to the rack than you'd think, but with one or two details that matter.

The setup, at a glance

Per the pro-gear bundle listing (last verified May 2026):

  • Frame: Yonex EZONE 98
  • String (mains): Yonex Poly Tour Pro
  • String (crosses): Yonex Poly Tour Pro (full bed)
  • Tension: not publicly confirmed in the listing
  • Customisation: not publicly detailed
  • Last verified: May 2026

That's the panel. Everything below is either reading into it or flagging where the public record runs out.

The frame: a paint job we actually trust

The EZONE 98 is one of the rare cases on tour where the retail frame and the player's frame look like they're in the same family. Yonex's pro-stock culture is less Pandora's-box than, say, Babolat's VS line or the Wilson H22 mould that lives under half a dozen paint jobs in the women's draw. There are pro-stock Yonex layups that exist — but with Bencic, we don't have public evidence (stringer interviews, racquet-bag photos with the butt-cap pulled) suggesting she's playing a fundamentally different mould under the EZONE livery. We'd treat it as a genuine EZONE 98, customised, until shown otherwise.

What we'd guess — and it is a guess — is that her gamer is leaded up from retail spec. The retail EZONE 98 comes in around 305 g unstrung with a balance in the 320 mm range. Almost every WTA player using this frame adds weight, usually at 3 and 9 for stability and sometimes under the grip to keep the balance from drifting head-heavy. None of that is confirmed for Bencic specifically in the source we're working from, so we won't pretend to a gram count. What we can say is that her game — taking the ball early, redirecting pace rather than generating it, hitting through the court rather than over it — is the exact profile that benefits from a stable, slightly heavier 98-inch frame. The EZONE's softer feel (relative to, say, a VCORE or a Pure Aero) also matches a player who lives inside the baseline and absorbs incoming pace rather than swinging through it.

The 98 head, not the 100, is the tell. Bencic isn't asking the frame for a margin of error she doesn't need. She's asking it for a predictable launch angle on a flat ball struck on the rise. That's what the smaller head, tighter string pattern, and slightly stiffer beam give her.

The string: the boring answer is the right one

Full bed of Yonex Poly Tour Pro. No hybrid. No gut-and-poly compromise. No headline-grabbing string change between surfaces that we're aware of.

Poly Tour Pro is Yonex's house co-poly — a relatively soft, control-oriented monofilament that sits on the comfortable end of the polyester spectrum. It isn't the spin-monster choice (that'd be Poly Tour Spin or Poly Tour Rev, both of which have shaped profiles); it's the timing-and-feel choice. The gauge isn't called out in the listing we're working from, so we won't pin a number on it; 1.25 mm is the common default for women's tour players on this string, but "common default" is not "confirmed for Bencic."

Tension is the gap in the public record we'd most like filled. The bundle listing doesn't carry a number, and we haven't seen a credible stringer-room pickup for her in recent months. The shape of her game — flat drives, short backswings, redirecting rather than ripping — would point toward a mid-range tension by tour standards, probably in the low-to-mid 20s kg, rather than the very low tensions favoured by heavy topspin players who want the string bed to launch. But that's inference from style, not from a pickup photo. Treat it as such.

What the full-bed Poly Tour Pro choice tells us is that Bencic isn't chasing free spin from her string bed. She's chasing a predictable response — the same launch angle on the same swing, ball after ball. Players who take the ball on the rise need the string to behave like a known quantity, because they don't have time to recalibrate mid-rally. A multi-string hybrid introduces a second variable; a full poly bed removes it.

So is this a normal tour setup, or an outlier?

It's normal in the boring, useful sense. Bencic is a non-outlier in a draw full of outliers: she's playing a current retail-derived frame in the most-used head size on the women's tour, strung with her sponsor's standard control poly, in a full bed. There's no Babolat-style pro-stock mystery, no hybrid weirdness, no surface-specific tension stunt that we have evidence of.

For the club player who admires her game and wants to know whether they can get closer to it by buying the EZONE 98 off the wall: the frame is genuinely accessible. It's one of the better-feeling 98s on the market, the string is widely available, and the logic of the setup — control poly, full bed, mid-tension, take the ball early — is reproducible at any level. What isn't reproducible without a coach and a decade is the timing. The setup supports the game; it doesn't supply it.

The honest "it depends" is the customisation. We don't know her static weight, her swing weight, or her balance point. A retail EZONE 98 in your hand and Bencic's gamer in her hand are almost certainly not the same stick by the time it reaches the court. If you demo the frame and find it whippy or unstable on contact, that's a customisation gap, not a frame flaw. Pros add lead. Most amateurs don't, and then wonder why the ball feels different on TV.

One thing from our own bag

For what it's worth: we've been playing an EZONE 98 strung full-bed Poly Tour Pro at 23 kg for the last six weeks, partly to see what the Bencic logic feels like under a club player's swing. The honest report is that the string job goes dead at around hour eight — noticeably earlier than the gut-poly hybrid we'd been using — and the first two sessions after a fresh string-up are the only ones where the launch angle feels truly locked in. Which is, presumably, why tour players restring every match. The setup isn't expensive to copy. The restring schedule is the part nobody puts in the bundle listing.