Tennis racquets for all levels: frame materials, weight, string patterns, and swing speeds. Honest reviews and specs without the marketing.
The static weight printed on a racquet's throat — 300 grams, 305, 11.2 ounces — is the least useful number for predicting how the thing will feel in your hand.
The advice you hear in every pro shop runs like this: beginners need power, advanced players want control, and spin is something you buy with an open string pattern.
We cut the factory string out of a brand-new performance racquet — a 305g, 16x19 player's frame sold "pre-strung and ready to play" — and ran the bed through a Beers ERT 300 before we touched it.
Buying a first racquet for a child is one of the few tennis purchases where the right answer is almost entirely measurable. Get the length right and most of the anxiety disappears.
On the bench we have a flat-palmed right hand, a steel ruler, and a tape measure. The player is a 5'9" club-level baseliner who has bought three racquets online in four years and returned none of them…
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.