Leylah Fernandez plays a Yonex VCORE 100 — the 300-gram, 100-square-inch spin frame — not the VCORE 98 that most of her tour-level peers reach for. That single choice does more to explain her game than any forehand grip diagram.

The setup, at a glance

  • Frame: Yonex VCORE 100 (300 g unstrung, 100 sq in head)
  • String (mains and crosses): Yonex Poly Tour Pro, full bed
  • Gauge: 1.25 mm (16L) — standard Poly Tour Pro spec she's been associated with; not separately confirmed for every restring
  • Tension: Not publicly confirmed at a per-tournament level
  • Grip / overgrip: Yonex Super Grap overgrip (per bundle listing)
  • Customisation: No publicly documented lead tape pattern, balance point, or swingweight figures
  • Last verified: May 2026, via the "Get the Gear the Pros Use" Fernandez bundle

Most of the interesting questions about Fernandez's stick sit in what isn't on that list — the lead tape, the static weight after customisation, the tension band she actually strings inside. Yonex players tend to be tight-lipped, and Fernandez's team hasn't put numbers on the record the way Sinner's or Alcaraz's camps have. So we'll work with what's confirmed and flag the rest.

The frame: VCORE 100 vs the VCORE 98 most pros pick

The cleanest way to read Fernandez's frame choice is to compare it directly with the VCORE 98, which is the Yonex tour stick of record — what Hugo Gaston, Nick Kyrgios at times, and a long list of junior-into-pro Yonex contracts end up using. Three criteria worth lining up:

Head size. The 100 gives her two extra square inches of string bed over the 98. On a player who generates racquet-head speed for a living, that's a bigger sweet spot and a more forgiving off-centre response — useful on the run, useful on the return, useful when you're 5'6" and have to take balls that are above the strike zone of taller opponents.

Static weight. 300 g unstrung on the 100 versus 305 g on the 98. Five grams isn't much in isolation, but layered on top of strings, overgrip and any lead, it shifts the frame from "tour spec, heavy" toward "tour spec, manageable." We'd guess Fernandez's match-ready weight lands somewhere in the 315–325 g range strung, but that's inference, not a documented number.

String pattern and stiffness. Both frames are 16x19, both sit in the mid-60s RA range, but the 100's slightly more open feel and larger face produce a livelier launch angle. Translation: balls come off faster and with a higher window, which suits a counterpuncher who likes to redirect pace rather than overpower it.

The verdict the comparison points toward: Fernandez has opted for a frame that prioritises maneuverability and margin over plow-through. That tracks with her game — she's a flat, early-ball lefty who wins points by taking time away, not by hitting through opponents from three feet behind the baseline. The VCORE 98 would give her more mass at contact, but it would also slow down the racquet head she uses to redirect. She picked the lighter one.

Whether there's a pro-stock layer underneath the paint job is, as with most Yonex contracts, not publicly known. Yonex's tour department does build custom moulds for top players, but unlike Wilson H22s or Head TGT pro-stocks, those Yonex pro layups rarely get documented in racquet-bag tear-downs. The safest reading: Fernandez is playing something very close to retail spec, possibly with internal weighting, but we haven't seen the kind of stencil-and-bumper evidence that would prove otherwise.

The string: a Poly Tour Pro full bed in a hybrid era

Here's where Fernandez sits as an outlier worth noting. Compare her stringbed against the dominant hybrid template on the WTA:

  • Hybrid camp (Świątek, Sabalenka, Pegula at various points): shaped co-poly mains for spin and bite, smoother round poly or gut crosses for comfort and tension stability. Two strings, two jobs.
  • Full-bed poly camp (Fernandez): one string doing everything — Poly Tour Pro mains and crosses.
  • Full-bed shaped poly (Gauff with Solinco Hyper-G at times): also one string, but a shaped/twisted profile for explicit spin gain.

Poly Tour Pro is a round, soft-for-a-poly co-polyester. It's not a spin string in the Hyper-G or RPM Blast sense — it's a control-and-comfort string. Yonex tend to recommend it to players who want predictable launch and don't want the harsh impact feel of a stiffer poly like Luxilon ALU Power.

Three criteria to weigh that against Fernandez's game:

Spin generation. A round poly in a 16x19 100-square-inch frame won't bite the ball the way a shaped poly in a denser pattern does. Fernandez isn't a heavy topspin player by tour standards — she hits flatter, takes the ball earlier, redirects cross-court to down-the-line as her signature pattern. The string matches the game. She doesn't need RPM Blast; she needs the ball to leave the strings where she aimed it.

Comfort and arm health. Full-bed poly is hard on the arm at high tensions. Poly Tour Pro is one of the softer co-polys on the market, which makes a full bed viable for a player who's been on tour since her teens and is now in her mid-20s with the cumulative load that implies. A hybrid with gut would be softer still, but it would also change the launch behaviour she's clearly built her timing around.

Tension stability. Round polys hold tension better than shaped ones, broadly. For a player who doesn't restring between every match — and we don't have public restring-frequency data for Fernandez the way we do for Federer's reported daily restrings — that matters. A stringbed that drops 2 kg over a week of practice changes the timing of every ball.

Tension itself we don't have on the record. The common guess for a 300 g spin frame strung with Poly Tour Pro in a tour context is somewhere in the 22–25 kg range, but that's a guess, and we'd rather say so than print a number.

What this tells you

Lined up against her peer group, Fernandez's setup reads consistently: a slightly larger, slightly lighter frame than the tour median, strung with a softer-than-average full-bed poly. Every piece of that nudges in the same direction — toward speed of swing, margin on contact, and a predictable launch angle she can time off the rise.

For the club reader: this is one of the rare pro setups where the frame (not the customisation, not the stringbed) is genuinely accessible. A retail VCORE 100 with Poly Tour Pro at a club-friendly tension in the high teens is a real, playable setup. Whether it suits you is a separate question — flat, early-ball hitters with quick hands will get along with it; grinders who like to swing through three feet of contact zone probably won't. But unlike a Pure Aero VS or an H22 pro-stock, you're not chasing a frame that doesn't exist at retail.

What you can't replicate is the part that isn't on the spec sheet: whatever weighting, balance work, and handle build Yonex's tour department has done under the paint. That's the gap between "the same racquet" and "the same setup," and with Yonex players it stays a gap because the documentation just isn't there.

Which leaves the question we genuinely don't know the answer to: is a lighter, livelier frame actually a sustainable choice for a smaller player over a fifteen-year career, or does the lower plow-through eventually cost more in late-match power than it saves in early-match maneuverability? The pros who've made similar choices — Schiavone, Henin in her time, Halep with the Wilson Blade 98 in 16x19 — don't tell a single story. Fernandez's career is still the experiment, and we won't know what the frame was worth until it's over.