The myth we keep hearing in pro shops is that Coco Gauff plays "the Head Boom Pro you can buy off the wall." She doesn't, not really — and the gap between her stick and the retail Boom is where most of the interesting questions live.

Let's lay out what's actually on the truck.

The setup, at a glance

  • Frame (badged as): Head Boom Pro
  • Likely layup: Head pro-stock, customised — retail Boom Pro is the closest commercial cousin, not a 1:1 match
  • String (mains): Head Lynx Tour, 17 gauge (1.25 mm)
  • String (crosses): Head Lynx Tour, 17 gauge — full bed, not a hybrid
  • Tension: Reported in the mid-to-high 50s lbs range; exact per-tournament numbers not publicly confirmed
  • Customisation: Lead tape and silicone added; final swing weight and balance not publicly disclosed
  • Last verified: May 2026 (per the pro-gear bundle listing and matching racquet-bag pickups through the spring swing)

A few of those lines deserve more than a bullet.

The frame: a Boom Pro paint job is not a Boom Pro spec

Head's commercial Boom Pro is a perfectly reasonable racquet — 310 g unstrung, 16x19 pattern, a slightly softer feel than the Speed line. It's marketed as Coco's stick, and Head is not lying, exactly. The mold she plays is in the Boom family. But pros at her level very rarely play a retail layup straight from the factory floor, and the public evidence — bag photos at the majors, stringer-room sightings, the consistent way her racquet plays heavier than reviewers describe the retail Boom Pro — all point to a customised pro-stock build under the paint.

What does "customised" mean here, concretely? Two things, both visible if you've ever held one of her frames in a stringer's room:

  1. Lead tape, almost certainly at the upper hoop (10 and 2) and possibly under the bumper guard. This pushes the swing weight up and adds plow-through on her forehand, which is one of the heavier balls on tour from a player who isn't tall by tour standards.
  2. Silicone in the handle, which raises static weight without changing the balance much. It also calms vibration, which matters when you're hitting a full bed of stiff poly.

We don't have a publicly confirmed final strung weight or swing weight. The educated guess, based on how the frame moves through her motion and how she loads her forehand, is somewhere in the 330–340 g strung region with a swing weight north of 330. That's a serious adult racquet — heavier than what the retail Boom Pro reviews suggest — and it's worth saying out loud, because that weight is doing a lot of work in the next paragraph.

The other thing the dataset doesn't tell us, but is worth flagging: Head's pro-stock codes (the TGT family) sometimes hide under Boom or Speed paint jobs for sponsored players, and there's no public confirmation of which code, if any, Coco's frame corresponds to. We're not going to guess one. If you see a forum post that names a specific TGT number for her, treat it as unverified.

The string: full-bed Lynx Tour, and why that's the choice

Coco strings a full bed of Head Lynx Tour at 17 gauge (1.25 mm). No hybrid, no gut, no shaped co-poly in the mains and round in the crosses — just one string, top to bottom. Tension sits in the mid-to-high 50s pounds; specific numbers per surface (clay vs. hard, indoor vs. outdoor) aren't publicly broken out in the source we're working from, so we're not going to invent them.

Wide-angle photograph of an empty professional tennis stringer's room at a Grand Slam tournament…

Lynx Tour is a shaped (hexagonal) co-poly, sitting in the "control with bite" category — firmer than a soft poly like RPM Soft, less brutal than a Hyper-G or a Tour Bite. The shaped profile grabs the ball on contact, which gives the spin player a little more rip without forcing them onto a string that turns to wire after two sets.

Why the full bed and not a hybrid with natural gut? A few reasons that match what we can see on court:

  • Spin priority. Coco hits a heavy ball off both wings, particularly the forehand. A shaped poly through the mains and crosses keeps the snapback consistent and the spin numbers high. Gut in the mains would add power and feel, but it would also reduce the bite she's clearly built her game around.
  • Tension stability over the match. Polys drop tension quickly, but at least the drop is uniform when both strings are the same. Hybrids with gut feel great fresh and notably different in the third set. For a player who restrings frequently (most top-30 women restring every match, often more than once per match on slower surfaces), uniformity beats peak feel.
  • Arm tolerance is bought via the frame, not the string. This is the key mechanism. A stiff poly at 56-ish pounds in an unweighted frame is a recipe for tennis elbow. In a heavily customised, plow-through frame with silicone in the handle, the string job becomes survivable — because the racquet absorbs the shock the string won't.

That last point matters for any club player reading this and reaching for their wallet.

What this tells you

The Coco setup is internally consistent: heavy customised frame + full bed of shaped poly + mid-to-high 50s tension is the orthodox modern-baseliner build, and she's a textbook example rather than an outlier. It's the same logical shape as Świątek's setup, or — on the men's side — Zverev's. The differences are in the specific string and the specific weight, not in the philosophy.

For a club player who admires her game, the honest read is: copy the logic, not the parts. Specifically:

  • The retail Head Boom Pro is a fine racquet, but it isn't her racquet. If you buy it off the wall and string it the way she does, you'll get a lighter, less stable frame with a stiff full bed of poly, which is the exact combination that produces sore forearms in adult-league players.
  • A full bed of Lynx Tour at 56 lbs is playable for a strong intermediate with a clean swing and no elbow history. It is not a good first poly, and it is not a good string for anyone hitting flat or short.
  • If you want the feel of her setup without the injury risk, the common move is to drop tension 4–6 lbs from the pro number and either go up a gauge (16 / 1.30 mm) or hybrid the crosses with a soft multifilament. You lose some spin; you keep your elbow.

The setup tells you something about Coco, too. The full-bed poly and the customised weight say she trusts her arm speed to generate power on her own — she's not asking the string bed to do it for her, and she's not asking the frame to be forgiving. That's a confident, modern, pro choice. It's also one of the harder choices to translate down the ladder.

Rule of thumb for tonight: If you're tempted to copy a pro's full-bed poly, drop the tension by at least 10% and play a thicker gauge — that single adjustment is the difference between studying the setup and getting hurt by it.