Author: Racquet Network

Racquet Network staff are certified experts. Many are also certified coaches. Racquet Network Experts undergo extensive training and product knowledge testing in order to ensure that we have the most knowledgeable staff in the racquet sports industry.
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Save $200 Stringing Babolat Tennis Racquets

Great news for Babolat fans in Calgary. Our Babolat tennis racquet program just got even better.

There is no point in buying your Babolat tennis racquets anywhere else because nobody can beat this deal.

Starting today, every customized Babolat ™ tennis racquet purchased in-store now comes with $200 in free stringing upgrades.

But wait! There’s more …

Customers who purchase these racquets from us will save time as well as money because they will be able to automatically upgrade from basic labour (one week turnaround) to guaranteed one-hour stringing at no extra charge.

Racquet Network’s new tennis program saves you $20 every time you string your racquet. It also cuts down on the number of trips you have to make to our store.

Here is how things normally work.

  1. Break a string.
  2. Bring racquet to the store.
  3. Go home and wait for email notification.
  4. Come back to the store a few days later to pick your racquet up.

In other words, you make two trips to the store.

Here is how things work now.

  1. Break a string.
  2. Book an appointment.
  3. Bring your racquet to the store.
  4. Wait 30 minutes and then take your racquet home with you.

In order words, you only come to the store once.

The new system also saves you money. Guaranteed one-hour racquet service normally costs $40.00 plus the cost of string. Under the new program, it costs the same as one-week service: $20 plus the cost of string.

So players who are participating in our new program save $200 and 10 trips to the store, which more than pays for the cost of a new racquet.

This is because when you purchase a new Babolat tennis racquet from us, we automatically include $200 worth of stringing upgrades.

While this is awesome deal for anybody who lives in southwest Calgary, this is an even better deal for tennis players who live far from our store because it saves them even more time and more money on racquet stringing services.

Our new tennis program, therefore, continues to be the best overall program in Calgary for tennis players who want to save time, save money and play with the best tennis racquets in the world. In addition to those three things, our program is also best for the environment because it reduces car trips and keeps racquets out of the landfills for longer.

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Best Badminton String for Children

Yonex Aerobite Badminton String

The tendency for most parents is to string their child’s badminton racquet with the cheapest, most durable string possible.

Bad idea!!

If the parent’s goal is to increase their child’s enjoyment of badminton, then the string should help them succeed.

Very few children are frequent string breakers. Once they become teenagers that may change for some — especially for some boys — but very few children ever break badminton strings. So there is no need to go for maximum durability.

Instead, children’s racquets should be strung for maximum enjoyment.

Stringing children’s badminton racquets for maximum enjoyment means stringing their racquets with the thinnest, most powerful string you can get your hands on.

All of the strings in the table below have been chosen by our coaches as suitable for children up to 10 years old. It does not matter if they are boys or girls or what kinds of shuttles they are using. Children at this age rarely smash, so these strings will work with both nylon and feather shuttlecocks.

Best Badminton String for Children

The badminton strings in this table are recommended by our coaches are the best options for most children. The reasons why they are recommended are discussed in this post.

The reason for stringing children’s racquets this way is simple. Thinner strings increase power. Increasing power allows them to hit the shuttle further. Hitting the shuttle further means longer rallies. Longer rallies equal more fun.

On the other hand …

When parents string children’s badminton racquets with durable string they end up generating less power. Less power means fewer shots make it over the net which leads to shorter rallies and less fun.

In fact, if this happens in a game situation, the result equals less success and more failure, which for many kids is no fun at all.

Stringing kids racquets with thinner more powerful strings means — in a game situation — that they will be able to hit the shuttle deeper.

If Child A strings for power and Child B strings for durability, then Child A has an advantage. Assuming they are equal, Child A will probably have more fun than Child B.

If Child A starts playing well enough that he or she is hitting the shuttle out the back of the court or if Child A starts to break strings more often than his or her parents can afford, then it’s time to choose something more durable.

But switching to a thicker string before that happens is not necessary and may be counterproductive to the whole point of enrolling a child in an athletic program.

In other words, if you want your child to have fun playing badminton, string their racquets with string that will offer them the most amount of fun.

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3 Ways to Make Your Tennis Club Instantly Eco-Friendlier

Eco-Friendly Tennis

More often now than ever before, customers are asking us about ways they can reduce the environmental footprint created by their decision to play tennis. Even clubs are becoming curious about how to make more eco-friendly decisions.

Here are three ways that your club can have an instant impact and reduce the amount of plastic waste generated by your club members.

1. Mandate Pressureless Tennis Balls

Depending on the size of your club, your members could be generating anywhere from 500 to 50,000 discarded plastic tennis tubes annually. Just one case of balls, for example, generates 24 tubes that go straight into the garbage. And since most tennis ball tubes cannot be recycled due to their metal rims, then end up in our landfills.

The simplest way to solve this problem is to mandate pressureless tennis balls. Not only do pressureless balls NOT come in pressurized plastic tubes, they last much longer than pressurized balls because they never go flat. In fact, clubs that we service with pressureless tennis balls have reduced their ball expenditures by more than 80% and their club’s generation of plastic tubes by 100%.

2. Mandate Eco-Friendly Strings

Tennis strings are second only to balls when it comes to generating plastic waste in tennis clubs. Not only are synthetic strings made of one kind of plastic or another, but many string sets also come in plastic packaging.

The best way to reduce this is to mandate what can or cannot be sold in your pro shop and/or used on your courts. Fully organic strings offer the most comprehensive solution because they contain fully biodegradable fibers. And mandating that every club member use them prevents creating a situation in which synthetic string users get an advantage over natural gut users.

If getting to this level of commitment is something your members are not yet ready for, consider some smaller steps. For example, your club could mandate 50% natural gut — which would require that at least half of every tennis racquet would use organic string. Or you could consider mandating your pro shop to offer only string sets sold in recyclable cardboard packaging. Or better yet, eliminate packaging almost entirely by offering only off-the-reel options.

The problem here, of course, is that players who want to rebel will buy their string elsewhere and may bring it to your club for installation. So in order to make this work, you may want also to mandate that club stringer can only use string purchased from the club.

3. Mandate Eco-Friendly Tennis Racquet Brands

Finally, the last thing you may want consider are the racquet brands that your club sells in its pro shop or allows players to use on their courts. Some brands — Head, for example — are especially aggressive in their marketing campaigns and introduce new frames and/or new colours every three months in order to cause players to throw out their old racquets and buy new ones.

Other brands — like Babolat, for example — commit to their frames for three years before changing colours or introducing new technologies. We can tell you from our many years of experience as racquet retailers that players who play with brands that offer slower model turnovers buy many fewer racquets over the course of 20 years than players who buy brands with rapid model turnovers.

We can also advise you that setting up an internal club system whereby players can sell their old racquets to other members does not actually reduce waste, it seems to increase it. This happens because the rapid turnover players now have a way to get some revenue out of their used racquets. So most of them actually increase the number of new frames they buy.

In the end, all of these choices are personal and every club that wants to become more eco-friendly is going to get there a different way. The most important thing right now is that some of the ideas above make it onto your club agenda in order to provoke some discussion.

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Best Badminton String for Nylon Shuttles

YONEX MAVIS 300 BADMINTON SHUTTLES

Nylon shuttles (sometimes called “plastic” shuttles) are much harder on badminton strings than feather shuttles. Therefore string breakage can be an issue for frequent players or hard hitters.

Each of the strings below have been selected by our experts as generally best for nylon shuttles. In this context, “best” means most durable.

Best Badminton String for Nylon Shuttles

For more information about each string, please click on the product and go to “Our Description” on the individual product page. The product page for each string gives you an idea of the type of player the string is most suitable for.

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Racquet Network (Re)Joins Tumblr

Racquet Network Tumblr

Now that Tumblr has decided that it will be reorienting itself as a family-friendly blogging site, Racquet Network has decided to activate our long dormant Tumblr account.

Although our Tumblr account was set up several years ago, we chose not to do anything with it due to Tumblr’s reputation. That changed on December 17 when Tumblr committed to removing all adult-only content from their service.

Racquet sports players who are also Tumblers can follow us at racquetnetwork.tumblr.com where we post regular social media updates.