A couple of weeks ago we picked a Yonex Ezone 98 off a demo rack at a club shop, put it on the scale unstrung, and got 305 grams on the nose. Then we strung it up at a sensible 23 kg and hit with it for half an hour. It was a fine racquet. It was also, by our rough maths, somewhere between 40 and 60 grams lighter than what Ben Shelton is actually swinging when he hits a 240 km/h serve on Ashe. That gap — between the frame on the wall and the frame in the bag — is the whole reason this piece exists.

Shelton is one of the more interesting setups on tour to decode, because he's a left-hander built like a college tight end who hits the ball harder than almost anyone, and yet the racquet he endorses is, on paper, a fairly standard 98-square-inch player's frame. So what's actually going on under the paint?

The setup, at a glance

Here's what we can stand behind as of our last verification pass in May 2026. Some of this is confirmed by retail bundle listings and stringer-room photos; some of it is reasonable inference, and we'll flag which is which as we go.

  • Player: Ben Shelton
  • Frame (endorsed): Yonex Ezone 98 family
  • String setup: poly-based, specifics below
  • Tension: not publicly confirmed at a single number; varies by surface and conditions
  • Customisation: present but not publicly itemised — pro-stock weighting and balance work is near-certain, exact spec is not
  • Grip: overgrip on standard leather/synthetic, no publicly confirmed grip-size oddity
  • Last verified: May 2026
  • Primary source for this piece: the Do It Tennis "Ben Shelton Pro Player Gear Bundle" listing, plus broadcast and bag-check pickups

That's the panel. Now the interesting part — what each line actually means in practice.

The frame

The Ezone 98 is what the retail consumer can walk into a shop and buy as Shelton's racquet. Whether it is, literally, Shelton's racquet is the more honest question.

In the Yonex stable, players who endorse the Ezone line don't all swing identical molds. The 98 head size is the player's-frame size; the 100 is the bigger, more forgiving cousin. Shelton is publicly aligned with the 98. We've seen no credible evidence he's hiding a different mold under the paint — unlike, say, the well-documented Babolat VS pro-stock chassis or Wilson's H22 layup, Yonex tends to keep its top endorsees on frames that are at least cosmetically and structurally close to the retail product. So when we say "Ezone 98," we mean it more literally than we would for, say, a top Babolat player on a Pure Aero.

What is almost certainly different from retail is the weight and balance. A stock Ezone 98 comes in around 305 grams unstrung. ATP players in Shelton's mould — big servers, heavy through the contact, generating racquet-head speed from physical strength rather than wristy whip — typically play strung specs in the 340–360 gram range with a slightly head-light balance to keep the frame manoeuvrable on returns. We don't have a publicly confirmed strung weight for Shelton's match frame, so we won't give you a number we made up. What we'll say is: if you picked up his actual gamer next to your demo, you would feel the difference in your forearm inside one swing.

The customisation work — lead tape under the bumper, silicone in the handle, a customised grip pallet — is standard practice at this level and almost certainly happening here, but the exact recipe is not something Yonex or Shelton's team publishes. Treat anyone online who tells you they know his precise swingweight to the gram with appropriate skepticism.

One more thing worth saying about the frame choice. The Ezone 98 is, in spirit, a control-oriented player's frame. Shelton is not, in spirit, a control-oriented player. He's a power-and-spin lefty whose game is built around the serve, the forehand, and increasingly the backhand-up-the-line. The frame choice tells us he doesn't need the racquet to add power — he has plenty — and he'd rather have the precision and the smaller sweet-spot's feedback. That is a very normal tour-pro logic: pros buy control from the frame and add power with their bodies. Club players tend to do the opposite.

The string

Shelton's string setup, per the bundle listing and what we can see in stringer-room shots, is a polyester-based job. We don't have a publicly confirmed full-bed-vs-hybrid call we'd stake the piece on, and we're not going to invent one. What we can say with confidence is that he's in the poly family — co-poly mains at the very least — at a gauge in the typical pro range (roughly 1.25–1.30 mm). Anything beyond that, including specific cross-string choices and exact gauges by tournament, is not publicly itemised in a way we trust.

Tension is the same story. There is no clean, broadly-cited "Shelton strings at X kilos." What you can reasonably assume, based on how players of his profile string up, is something in the 22–25 kg range with downward adjustments in cold or heavy conditions and upward adjustments in fast, hot ones. If you see a forum post claiming a precise number to one decimal place without a stringer-photo source, treat it as folklore.

Re-string frequency for a top-50 ATP player is effectively "every match, sometimes between sets," and we have no reason to think Shelton is an exception. Polyester goes dead fast under big swings, and his swings are big.

The choice of poly tracks his game cleanly. He needs the string bed to absorb a violent forehand swing without launching, he needs spin to keep heavy balls in court at the angles he likes, and he doesn't need the string to be kind to his arm in the way a natural-gut hybrid would be. He's young, he's strong, and the comfort tax of full poly is one he can afford. That calculation is almost the opposite of the one a 45-year-old club player should be making.

What this tells you

Shelton is not, by tour standards, an outlier setup. The Ezone 98 family is well-populated at the top of the game. The poly string bed is standard. The customisation is invisible to the consumer but assumed by anyone who pays attention. What makes the setup distinctive is the body swinging it: a left-handed, exceptionally strong, serve-first player using a frame designed for control because he is the source of the power.

For a club player who admires Shelton and is tempted by the bundle: the retail Ezone 98 is a perfectly reasonable racquet for an advanced player with a long, fast swing. It will not, on its own, give you his serve, and full poly at tour tensions will quietly wreck most amateur elbows inside a season. If you want the closest honest copy of the spirit of his setup, buy the Ezone 98, string it with a softer poly or a poly-multifilament hybrid at a tension you can actually swing through, and skip the lead tape until you know what you're trying to fix.

Back to that demo on the club shop scale. The 305-gram number isn't wrong — it's just the start of the story, not the end of it. The retail frame is the chassis. What Shelton plays is the chassis plus a stringer, plus a customisation bench, plus fifteen years of swinging hard at a yellow ball.

The myth: buy Ben Shelton's racquet and you've bought Ben Shelton's setup. The more accurate version: you've bought the unweighted, unstrung, uncustomised skeleton of it, and the rest is a body and a stringer you don't have.