{"id":3811,"date":"2025-07-12T08:41:03","date_gmt":"2025-07-12T08:41:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/3811\/"},"modified":"2025-07-12T08:41:03","modified_gmt":"2025-07-12T08:41:03","slug":"how-tennis-stars-get-the-rackets-strings-and-tensions-they-need-for-wimbledon-success","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/3811\/","title":{"rendered":"How tennis stars get the rackets, strings and tensions they need for Wimbledon success"},"content":{"rendered":"

THE ALL ENGLAND CLUB, LONDON \u2014 On the first day of Wimbledon<\/a>, Ed Day, a university student from just outside London, ran 17.5 kilometers across the All England Club. Those kilometers took him from the on-site stringing center, which is near the players\u2019 practice facility, to various courts around the ground.<\/p>\n

His mission?<\/p>\n

Delivering rackets to players who have requested a restring during their match. Day, who along with the other runners who are part of the Court Services team, wears a high-visibility vest for the job, has to weave in and out of tennis fans to get where he is going as fast as he can. He has just returned from a sprint to No. 3 Court, and will soon be back out in the heat dodging spectators with another racket in his hand.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis one is for Anastasia Zakharova, that one\u2019s for Luciano Darderi,\u201d he says. \u201cWe have a special tunnel that gets us to No. 3 Court, but after that you are on your own with the masses.\u201d<\/p>\n

Day worked at Wimbledon last year and says his highlight was delivering a racket to Emma Raducanu<\/a>, whose coach this summer, Mark Petchey, has just picked up three rackets before her second-round match against Mark\u00e9ta Vondrou\u0161ov\u00e1<\/a>.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s how the players get their rackets back. The runners also have to bring them for restringing in the first place. Each racket is logged by the strings required and the tension. The old strings will be cut off and a stringer will get to work.<\/p>\n

On day one, they had 50 restrings mid-match and 664 across the 256 players who needed them doing before or after matches. By the end of women\u2019s semifinal day, 6,400 rackets had passed through the stringing center, which is run by Babolat. Last year\u2019s total was 6,188.<\/p>\n

Twenty-five stringers work on 23 machines, from 7 a.m. until shortly after play concludes for the day.<\/p>\n

Among those in the workshop on day three is Paul Skipp from Portsmouth. The 55-year-old has been stringing rackets since he was 18. This is his 20th time working at Wimbledon, and when The Athletic finds him, he is in the middle of restringing the racket of American player Tommy Paul.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve strung for all the top names. I strung Andy Murray\u2019s racket for his first match at Wimbledon in 2005 and I strung Carlos Alcaraz for his first time at Wimbledon too.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve strung a racket in probably 10 and a half minutes,\u201d he says, calmly threading the string through. \u201cThat\u2019s when it has come in from court and someone\u2019s asked for it really quickly. But normal time is around 17 minutes per racket.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe try to keep the same stringer for each player, to be consistent. Players like that, especially if they need little changes to be made to tension. Most of the top players won\u2019t be demanding too much. You will actually get stranger requests from players a little further down the rankings, like where to tie knots or wanting the logo in a slightly different place.\u201d<\/p>\n

Manuela Villa Topple knows all about the detailed levels of some requests. The 20-year-old is part of a small team who gives each and every racket their finishing touch by painting on a branded logo.<\/p>\n

\u201cAfter the rackets get strung, they bring it down to our station and we find the right stencil, the right color and we draw on the logos with solvent paint,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

\u201cSometimes they have two logos, two colors, depending on their sponsorship deals. We have to be very careful we don\u2019t get it wrong because if we do and it\u2019s a certain string type, like natural gut (made from the intestines of cows), that racket has to be restrung entirely because we can\u2019t rub the ink off.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tennis strings come in three main categories: natural gut, multifilament, which is synthetic but made up of thousands of fibres woven together per string, and polyester, which is a single fibre per string. Polyesters, and some multifilaments, come in different geometries. Some have a rough surface for increased spin production. All strings come in different thicknesses: thinner means more power and comfort; thicker can help add control and durability.<\/p>\n

Natural gut is the most expensive, the most powerful, comfortable and plushest; polyester strings are cheaper and offer the most spin and control, but are less comfortable; multifilaments are somewhere in between.<\/p>\n

If these descriptions sound sweeping, that\u2019s because they are. Tennis players, from recreational to professional, are very particular about their strings. Some, including Roger Federer, will not string their racket with just one string, but two. This is a hybrid set-up, offering the benefits of two types of string by putting one in the mains (the strings that run vertically, parallel to the racket handle) and the crosses (which run perpendicular to the mains.)<\/p>\n

And once they have chosen their strings, they have to choose a tension. As with strings, there is a general range \u2014 between 21 kg (46 lbs) and 25 kg (55 lbs) \u2014 but some players are outliers. Adrian Mannarino of France plays down at 8.6 kg (19 lbs) on occasion, which is like playing with a trampoline.<\/p>\n

\u201cForty [kilograms] is about the max you can do,\u201d Babolat employee Josh Newton explains while spinning a racket around.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not sure I\u2019ve ever had anyone over 40 as that\u2019s the max for the machine. The tighter it is the less power off the racket but the ball comes off the strings faster. It has a sensation of popping off the strings but it has less velocity than if you string it looser. Looser is like a trampoline so it sinks in and then it bounces off.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tension also needs to be adjusted to the weather. In the heat of the early rounds and the semifinals, players will have strung slightly tighter to mitigate the increased liveliness of the balls and the grass. They will have several rackets in their bag during matches, strung at different tensions with half a pound or a pound between them.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re usually in batches of 12, maybe every few months they change them because of the constant hitting and restringing, which will affect the racket a bit as well,\u201d Skipp says. \u201cThe heat will have affected them here. The players may find they need more rackets, with tension in the strings dropping quicker.\u201d<\/p>\n

They will also customize their stencils. Red, black and white are the three main colors, but last year\u2019s women\u2019s singles champion, Barbora Krej\u010d\u00edkov\u00e1, likes to use silver on her Head racket. She takes her own silver paint with her to each tournament. When British duo Eden Silva and Joshua Paris paired up in the mixed doubles, they both went logo-free, which is rare.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Manuela Villa Topple and her array of stencils for tennis stars\u2019 rackets. (Caoimhe O\u2019Neill \/ The Athletic)<\/p>\n

Iga \u015awi\u0105tek, who will play Amanda Anisimova in the women\u2019s final, likes to have her Tecnifibre logo painted as low down on her racket as possible, while Kate\u0159ina Siniakov\u00e1, who won the mixed doubles with partner Sem Verbeek, always wants her red Wilson logo to be painted from the fourth string from the top rather than the fifth.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe came in and said: \u2018I know it sounds crazy but for me that just works.\u2019 Apparently she can see when the logo\u2019s wearing off more when it\u2019s on the fourth string but for some it is superstition too,\u201d says Villa Topple, whose highlight has been adding logos to the racket of fellow Italian and men\u2019s world No. 1 Jannik Sinner.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe try to help the player every time. If they have a special request we will try to do it,\u201d says Eric Ferrazzi, head of racket service for Babolat.<\/p>\n

The stringing center serves more than 700 players at Wimbledon and has been doing so since the company took over the racket services in 2022. Not all players will use the service here: seven-time Wimbledon champion Novak Djokovic uses a private stringer.<\/p>\n

With just four singles matches left, the organized chaos of the early rounds has given way to a calmer environment. But Day and his hi-vis will still be ready to run, just in case one of the remaining stars needs a racket with which to play the biggest point of their career.<\/p>\n

(Top photo: Henry Nicholls \/ AFP via Getty Images)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"THE ALL ENGLAND CLUB, LONDON \u2014 On the first day of Wimbledon, Ed Day, a university student from…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3812,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[690,99,1794,428],"class_list":{"0":"post-3811","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tennis","8":"tag-culture","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-sports-business","11":"tag-tennis"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3811","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3811"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3811\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3812"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}