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.
Racquets at this level are stiff with tiny sweet spots.Elite female badminton players can use racquets that are simply not beneficial for players at lower levels. Racquets at this level are stiff with tiny sweet spots. Strung at very high tensions, these racquets rely on the strengths and abilities of the players and do provide any additional power.
Below is a sample of badminton racquets that our experts have determined to be generally suitable for elite female badminton players. For more information, please come into the store and consult with one of our experts. We are open 7 days a week and we carry Calgary’s largest selection of badminton racquets for men, women, teens and children.
For a full list of racquets in this category, please check out our ONLINE RACQUET SELECTOR. You can sort by sport, gender, brand, size, weight, balance and more.
Badminton Racquets for Elite Females
A sample of racquets our experts believe are suitable for elite female badminton players.
For a full list of racquets in this category, please check out our ONLINE RACQUET SELECTOR. You can sort by sport, gender, brand, size, weight, balance and more.
This article was created as a resource for club promoters who are trying to enlist the assistance of their members in the task of attracting new members. All of the articles in this series offer suggestions to club members regarding how they can help to attract new members. Club promoters are encouraged to link to it if they wish to provide suggestions to their members.
Why Beginners Matter
Spending Habits of New PlayersRacquet Network has been in business for a long time. We offered our first lessons in 2004. We opened our first store in 2010. During the years since we first opened our doors our coaching team has taught more than 10,000 adults and children to play racquet sports. We have also registered more than 50,000 sales transactions with players at all levels.
As you can imagine, this many people and this many transactions across this many racquet sports leave behind a large amount of data to aggregate. And from this aggregate data, we can draw some interesting conclusions that are beneficial to every type of racquet sports club.
Here is a concrete example of how that data can be used. There are two squash clubs in our part of the city. Both have about the same number of players, both cater to adult males. Club A is closer to us than Club B, so you would expect that Club A would generate more sales for us than Club B. In fact, however, Club B generates more spinoff business for our store than Club A for one simple reason.
Club B is marginally better than Club A at attracting new players. And by that we don’t mean members who are new to Club B; we mean players who are new to playing the game of squash. Or in other words, Club B is better than Club A at attracting and retaining beginners.
Club A is caught in what we call a cycle of high performance failure. They have turned their club over to a volunteer who spends all of his time trying to attract better players from other clubs. He is focussed almost entirely on Club A’s interclub team performance. Therefore, whether he knows it or not, under his leadership, Club A is pursuing a high performance agenda — an agenda that will ultimately fail the club’s shareholders.
Club B, on the other hand, is more open both to new members and new players. They have more to offer than just an opportunity to play on a winning interclub team. They actually have programs and activities that are attractive to beginners who may be two or three years away from having enough confidence to join an interclub squash team.
Spending Habits of New PlayersWhy does this matter? Take a look at the graph at the start of this post. It is an approximation based on aggregate internal data gathered from years of tracking customer purchasing at Racquet Network.
Each bar represents one year of expenditures for players who are new to the sport. You can see that new players spend as much in their first two years as they do in their next three years combined. In fact, most players spend more in their second year of involvement with a new racquet sport than they do in any other year.
Now think about a club filled with 100 players in Year 5 and beyond (Y5+). If you look at what these players are likely to spend on their sport, you will see that 100 of these guys will spend as much as 20 players in their second year (Y2). So a club with 50 Y5+ members and 50 Y1/Y2 members is in a much stronger position financially than a club with 100 Y5+ members.
Think back to glory days for squash in the 80s and 90s. In those days, clubs could make some money. And in those days, the clubs were full of beginners. As the sport of pickleball is demonstrating across Canada today, clubs that are full of Y1s and Y2s are way better off than clubs full of Y5+ players.
So when we say that Club A is caught in a cycle of failure, it should be clear now what we mean. Success in the club’s interclub standings is coming at the expense of Club A’s bottom line. Fortunately for us, we are not shareholders in Club A. So, unlike the actual shareholders, we can be somewhat clinical about their prospects.
However, we would prefer to see Club A succeed and stay open. Given their proximity to our business, it would be nice to see them regain their footing and move away from a high performance agenda toward a high participation agenda. In fact, we think it would be nice to see every club in Canada now pursuing a high performance agenda move to back to a high participation agenda because that would be good for the clubs and for every retailer and manufacturer who serves these clubs.
Are one or more of your toenails turning black? Yes. Then your shoes are too small. Specifically, your shoes are too short for court sports.
Here at Racquet Network, our expert staff are constantly astonished at the number of stubborn people who come into our store to buy new shoes because the shoes they are wearing are damaging their feet and who end up buying exactly the same size, expecting a different result.
Here is how a typical conversation with one of these customer’s goes …
Staff: “Hi there. How can I help you?”
Customer: “I need some new shoes. The shoes I have are too small. They are making my toenails turn black.”
Staff: “Oh no. That’s not good. What size are they?”
Customer: “They are size 9.”
Staff: “OK. So would you like to try on something in a size 10?”
Customer: “No. Size 10 is too big. I wear a size 9.”
Staff: “I’m sorry. I must have misunderstood. I thought you said your size 9 shoes were causing your toenails to turn black.”
Customer: “Well these ones are. But I just need a different size 9. I am always a size 9.”
It is never good when a fitting starts this way, but this is exactly the way many fittings start. The customer has a number in their head and no amount of expert advice or actual evidence will sway them. So, they end up leaving with the wrong size in spite of our best efforts to convince them otherwise.
Fathers of teen-aged daughters can be especially frustrating for our shoe experts. Some of them seem to think that their daughters are less attractive if they wear shoes that actually fit, so they buy shoes that are too small and that end up causing injuries.
This not a joke. It’s not just a story we tell. This actually happens. We have seen teenaged girls leave our store in tears because they know that the shoes their fathers are buying for them are too small and will make their toenails fall off. We have had angry fathers storm out of the store because we demonstrated to them that their daughter’s feet are a size and half bigger than they used to be.
We’re not sure why but men in general rarely seem to know their shoe size. “What size are you?” we will often ask. “Size 10,” guys will say. “What size are those?” we ask, pointing at the shoes on their feet. When we check, we usually find out they are not even close to what they thought they were wearing.
Racquet Network staff are trained to fit people for court shoes. Our staff know that court shoes have to be longer than walking-around-shoes because players have to stop suddenly and change direction. When shoes are too short for this, toes bang against the end of the shoe causing toenails to blacken and fall off.
Our staff also understand that width is important. When a player’s feet are wider than the platform of the shoes they are wearing, they are prone to specific types of injuries that can lead to arthritis later in life.
Our experts want to see all customers leave our store with shoes that fit. They don’t have any preconceived ideas about that size the customer should wear or what size the customer (or their father) might want to wear. They only thing they are concerned about is what actually fits. For that to happen, the shoe must be long enough and it must be wide enough.
At the end of the day, though, they can’t force anybody to buy the right size. So they will always have to deal with the disappointment of customers who stubbornly resist their best advice and insist on buying shoes that are too short or too narrow just because that is the size they always buy.
Wilson ProfileRacquet Network is one of Canada’s oldest pickleball retailers. As one of the country’s original pickleball dealers, we have been selling pickleball equipment on racquetnetwork.com and okpickleball.com for longer than most Canadians have been playing it.
Some of the staff on our coaching team have been certified by Pickleball Canada since they first started certifying instructors back in 2010. In the years since then, our team of instructors has taught hundreds of hours of pickleball lessons on top of thousands of hours of tennis and squash lessons.
The vast majority of people who take lessons from our instructors are beginners. In the years since we first started teaching racquet sports (2004), our team has taught more than 10,000 beginners how to play tennis, squash and pickleball. So it is safe to say that when it comes to beginners, we know our stuff.
As a group, our coaching team can confidently assure you that beginners in all racquet sports have a number of things in common. First, they have slower swings than intermediates or experts. They hit balls off center more often. They are slower to react, they tend to hang back rather than move forward and they generally grip their racquets too firmly.
Indeed, regardless of the sport, coaches in all racquet sports can watch new players move progressively through small stages from beginner to intermediate to advanced. Some players progress quickly; some slowly. But as they progress, their coach will see certain things happen. Their swing speed, foot speed and reaction speed will all accelerate. Their ability to receive the ball and middle it on their racquet/paddles will increase. Their grips will relax and they will recognize opportunities to move forward and attack.
This is true of all three sports — tennis, squash and pickleball — and any coach who teaches all three will tell you the same thing. There are fundamental differences that separate beginners from intermediates from advanced players. When you understand these differences you will understand why beginners struggle with equipment made for intermediates and experts.
Consider this one concrete example: racquet/paddle weight. In all three sports, beginners benefit from heavier racquets and paddles in a number of ways. First, beginners rarely hit the ball in exact center of their paddle or racquet. Intermediates, by contrast, do it much more often while advanced players do it consistently.
Hitting off center reduces both power and accuracy. So to help offset these common beginner level errors, a good coach will recommend a heavier racquet or paddle. Eventually, these beginners will learn to middle the ball more consistently and will not need a heavier racquet/paddle to cover up their mishits, but in the meantime, they will enjoy more success.
Hitting off center is not the only common beginner issue addressed by heavier racquets/paddles though. As mentioned above, beginners have slower swing speeds. They also hesitate to move forward, primarily because they lack experience and therefore the ability to anticipate what is about to happen. This combination often means that beginners are forced to hit the ball over longer distances than intermediate or expert players. Once again, heavier — and in the case of pickleball, thicker — equals more power. More power, in this case, helps to overcome some deficiencies in beginner level strokes and movement.
As any credible coach will tell you, there is no question that heavier, thicker paddles are better for beginners than lighter, thinner paddles. The same is true for grip size. Thicker grips are better for beginners than thinner grips.
Thicker grips provide more traction than thinner grips. Traction lock the paddle in place and prevents it from turning in the player’s hand when the ball is hit off center. Traction also allows the player to relax their grip. And finally, thicker grips reduce the occurrence of tennis elbow — the most common injury found in new pickleball players.
So as coaches, there is no doubt about the paddles that we recommend to beginners in our store. Our goal is to put a paddle in their hands that will maximize their enjoyment and minimize their chances of suffering injury. So in all three sports — tennis, squash and pickleball — this means a heavier racquet or paddle than we would recommend to an expert.
If you do a quick internet search, you will see that there are a lot of brands offering “wide” court shoes. However, if you have wide feet and if you have ever ordered any of these “wide” shoes, you will already know that very few of these “wide” shoes are actually wide.
So what should you do if you either know or suspect that you have wide feet?
The very best thing you can do is to come into our store and allow our experts to fit you properly. In our experience, most players — especially guys — are wearing the wrong shoe size. They think that court shoes should fit either like their walking-around-shoes or, worse yet, like their hockey skates.
Court shoes are neither. If you are a normal person, you don’t suddenly stop and change direction at high speed in your walking-around-shoes. You also don’t turn your feet sideways to stop in your court shoes like you do when you are stopping on skates.
Many of the customers we fit on a daily basis suffer from blackened toe nails. This is a sure sign their court shoes are too short. Many more deal with chronic foot pain, which is often a sign of shoes that are too narrow or long past worn out.
How can you tell which of these two is causing your pain? Start with some simple math.
Competition grade shoes today are designed to last about 500 kilometers. On average, racquet sports players cover approximately four kilometers per hour. So a competition grade court shoe will last a maximum of 125 hours of court time — less for recreational grade shoes and much less for budget grade shoes.
If you play once a week for two hours, competition grade shoes may last a year. If you play twice a week, they will last about half a year. But if you are buying recreation grade or budget grade shoes and playing frequently, you are looking at replacing your shoes every two to four months.
The grade of the shoe makes a difference, too, of course. Competition grade shoes are designed to take maximum abuse. Recreational grade shoes don’t last as long as competition grade shoes, but are generally more comfortable. Budget shoes are neither. They are not designed for comfort or durability. Budget shoes are intended for teenagers who will outgrown their shoes before they wear them out.
So in determining what might be causing your foot pain, you must consider both the grade of shoes you are wearing and the amount of game time you have been wearing them. But if you have good shoes that are reasonably new and you are still experiencing foot pain (without blackened toenails), there is a good chance that your shoes are too narrow for your feet.
How wide is wide and what is actually available?
Athletic shoes for men come in a variety of standard widths. B is for narrow feet. D is a standard fit. 2E is wide. 4E is extra wide. Not all athletic shoes are suitable for court sports, though. So while it is possible to find running shoes in all four of these widths, options in court shoes are severely limited and none of the major sporting goods stores even offer them.
Forget about B in men’s court shoes. There is no such animal. If you are genuinely a B width male, you will have to look into women’s court shoes. We have never seen a men’s court shoe available in a B width.
Unlike B width, 2E is not impossible to find. Some brands, like Victor, offer unisex shoes in 2E width. In women’s shoes, 2E is extra wide while for men 2E is just wide. However, in our experience there just aren’t very men who fit comfortably into 2E shoes. More than 90% of the men we help with wide feet are actually 4E.
The good news? Of all the non-standard width court shoes, 4E are the most widely available. That being said, nobody should imagine that 4E shoes are commonly available. They are not. In fact, they are very far from common and you will almost certainly have to go to a specialty store to find some.
Yonex Canada typically offers one model in 4E per season. Other court shoe brands are less committed but may offer a 4E every once in awhile. Asics, for example, offers running shoes and a couple of lines of cross trainers in that width but nothing specifically 4E in a court shoe. Victor offers some unisex shoes in 2E, but rarely stocks an actual 4E. Everybody else offers either standard D width or D in a relaxed fit, which can be forced onto a 2E foot, if nothing else is available.
Here in Calgary, every racquet sports player knows that Racquet Network is the best place to go for court shoes. We carry the most models in the most sizes. We carry more colours and more wide shoes than anybody else. So if we don’t have it, you can assume that it probably isn’t available. For players with genuinely wide feet, this statement is even truer than for people with standard feet.
Our Pro Shop has moved to Canyon Meadows Shopping Center. It is on the 2ND FLOOR of the NORTH WING. The unmarked glass doors leading to the second floor are immediately to the right of the Rexall Drug Store. Please note the new address: 2ND FLOOR - NORTH WING, UNIT 201, 11625 ELBOW DR SW. Dismiss
