Home » RSI magazine » Ask the Experts » How often to change racquets, revisited

How often to change racquets, revisited

Q: I have a customer who just obtained sponsorship from a racquet manufacturer, and as part of his contract, he receives a certain number of frames each year. What’s the best way of “managing” these frames? Should he put them all into service right away, split them into groups and rotate among them, or what?

A: It depends in part on the temperament and talent of your customer. In the temperament department, if he expresses his on-court frustration by breaking frames, “managing” frames becomes hopeless at his level of sponsorship.

Likewise, if you think he’s a good player, but without the potential to become good enough to continue to obtain sponsorship, then you might think about trying to make his frame allotment last as long as possible.

However, let’s look on the positive side: He’s got a great disposition and a bright future, so he’s easy on racquets and stands to be renewed or picked up by another manufacturer at the end of his current contract. In this case, your best bet would be to figure out how many frames your customer needs to get him through any conceivable tournament, divide that into your racquet allotment, and you’ll have the number of times each year you should change his racquets.

For example, if he gets a dozen racquets per year, and needs four racquets to get through a tournament, then you’ll want to change racquets three times a year, or every four months.

As you “retire” racquets, you should hang onto them just in case his travel racquets go missing or disaster strikes — they’ll be your back-up sticks.

The reason you want to rotate racquets this way is that you don’t want your customer to wind up with a few “favorite” racquets that he’s played with for years. Think of it as being analogous to frequent restringings: Just as you don’t want your player to perform at his best using ancient strings that could break at any moment, you don’t want him to accustom himself to frames that literally cannot be replaced. At the pro level, weekly (or daily) restringing and hours of hitting day in, day out, can and will soften a frame. If your customer becomes attached to a softened frame and it breaks or goes missing, you won’t be able to match it with a new frame. The only way to avoid this is to provide the freshest frames you can at all times.

This approach also helps ease transitions at the end of the year, when there might be a slightly different frame available from the sponsor, or from a potential new sponsor. This is especially important if the sponsor is willing to make a special frame for your customer, as building a new frame that matches the characteristics of a worn-out frame is going to be impossible.

One last thing that will make everyone’s life easier is to get the sponsor to agree that the racquets it provides will be matched for flex. Newly-sponsored players typically can’t get the manufacturer to do more than provide the frames: Customization and matching will be up to you. Because you can’t reliably modify the flex of the frame, you don’t want to be stuck with racquets of differing flex, if you can avoid it. If the sponsor won’t agree to provide flex-matched frames, see if you can at least get it to agree to exchange frames after you check the flex yourself.

Whether or not you can get such assurances from the sponsoring racquet company, you definitely need to match each of your player’s frames for weight, balance, and swingweight as soon as they arrive. Among other benefits, this establishes a baseline onto which you can do any further modifications, and helps your player to get what he wants from sponsors when it’s time for an equipment change.

See all articles by Greg Raven

From the June 2009 issue
Permalink