Tennis Equipment - The Racket

It is essential to use the right equipment for Tennis. While increasing your overall performance, you will also protect yourself from potential injuries by making the right choices.

The great thing about tennis is all you really need is a tennis racket, a ball; and a pair of tennis shoes! Let’s take a look at suggestions for choosing the right type of equipment for you.

In this post we will start with the tennis racket. When you consider your tennis racket, you will consider it’s weight; unless you want to suffer from tennis elbow. Female players generally like to choose a tennis racket which is comfortable and most likely weighs less than 9 oz when they first start playing tennis. Less expensive tennis rackets are usually made of aluminum and work great for beginning players. Once you play regularly, you can consider paying more for a racket. No doubt you will have friends that play and see many types of rackets you can consider.

There are many brands; Wilson, Prince, Head, Babolat, Yonex to name just a few. Score At Hand, the tennis racket scorekeeper fits on all of these tennis rackets. You can put Score At Hand on the inside of the “Y” of your racket or on the outside. The stickers will keep it in place and are built to withstand weather conditions. If you have not yet seen Score At Hand in action, you can see the video here.

 

Also important is grip size. Grips range from around size 4 to 5 in 1/4 increments. In other words, 4, 4 1/4, 4 1/2, 4 3/4, and 5. Generally it’s better to go small on your grip as you can always add more layers of grip tape to make it larger, but once you get a larger grip, you can’t go smaller. One of the grips I have found most effective is KLIPPER as this brand is tacky yet works well if you sweat. They also make leather grips and cushion grips which increase size. Grips are replaced sporadically as needed.

Also consider the head size of your racket, the strings, string tension, and a vibration dampener. String tension is very personal. Some people like tighter strings for power, but that sacrifices control. There will be later posts for details about stringing your racket. Using a dampener is a personal choice; but you can feel the change in your racket when the ball hits the string bed.

Keep in mind that you cannot just place the dampener randomly; tennis rules only allow dampeners to be placed outside the pattern of the crossed strings.