We offer a full range of Yonex ™ badminton string, including all colours imported by Yonex Canada from Yonex Japan. Customers can either visit us in-store where we offer expert service and practical advice regarding Yonex badminton string or they can order online. We offer free shipping subject to minimums and some conditions.
Yonex Badminton String
For a full list of racquets in this category, please check out our ONLINE STRING SELECTOR. You can sort by sport, gauge, diameter, colour and more
Take a good look at the racquet in the image at the top of this article. It won’t take you long to see why the string broke where it broke.
It broke because the grommet for that string hole is both crushed and split. Two holes to the left of that, another grommet is broken.
You can see that we slid the separated grommet down the string to provide a landmark for another image of the same racquet from a different angle which is posted a little further down this page.
If you find that image, you will be a able to see what is happening on the outside of the racquet, which is the other side of the hole where the string broke.
The moment the bumper guard breaks, the racquet becomes a string eater. Why did the grommet split? Probably because the bumper guard broke. Why did the bumper guard break? Because the player hit the wall.
Did either of these happen because of something the racquet stringer did six weeks ago when he strung the racquet for the client?
Absolutely not. Yet the customer’s first instinct when the string broke was to blame us.
We didn’t use the racquet. We didn’t break the bumper guard. We didn’t split the grommet.
The customer did it. He hit the wall. Hitting the wall broke the bumper guard. Breaking the bumper guard weakened the grommet. The grommet split, exposing the soft string to the hard graphite edge of the racquet frame. Then eventually, the string broke in exactly that spot.
These events may not have happened on the same day. Each may have occurred days or weeks apart. But each event led to the other and the end result was a broken string.
So before you blame the professional who strung your racquet, ask yourself this question: is my racquet a string eater?
If you have a broken bumper guard, your racquet is a string eater. If you have broken grommets, your racquet is a string eater. If your grommets are split but not fully broken, your racquet is on its way to becoming a string eater.
If your racquet is a string eater and you want to keep it you have two choices. Either fix it or be prepared to feed it a lot of string.
Don’t blame us. We will always advise you to fix rather than feed a string eater. In fact, we carry a lot of parts just so you have the option of fixing it.
Outfitting a racquet with a new bumper guard and grommets costs about $20.00, parts and labour included. However, if your racquet is a string eater, doing this could save you many times that amount.
Calgary’s Racquet Network is well known for our custom racquet stringing program. Top players from all over southern Alberta and interior British Columbia bring their racquets in for full customization. When their game is on the line, they trust us with their most important tools.
What is not as well know is that we also offer discount racquet stringing for players who just want some string in their racquets and aren’t necessarily looking for the whole custom racquet stringing experience.
Our discount stringing services programs and handled by the same staff of professional stringers who do racquets for the top players. They use the same machines and the same techniques, they are just done at a time of day when our machines and our staff would normally be sitting idle. This allows us to charge less that we do during peak hours.
Free Racquet Stringing
Our cheapest option is free. We have a free stringing program that rewards players who are making important volunteer contributions to the growth of their sports in Calgary. Depending on the player and what their contributions have been recently, we may reward them with free labour on single racquet as a one-time thing or we may string all of their racquets for free all of the time.
We also have a program that allows Calgary coaches, parents and active players access to our stringing machine after hours so that they can string their own racquets.
Players who have not made a significant contribution to the growth of their sports are required to pay the usual fees for stringing services, but that doesn’t mean they have to pay full price for custom stringing services every time they come in. In fact, we offer a number of discount options as well.
Our best know economy option is our Stringing-On-the-Spot program which runs from 5:00-8:00pm every weekday. We also offer a “Just the Basics” program and another program for frequent string breakers.
Surprise Bonuses
Customers who come in for our On-the-Spot stringing program, are sometimes surprised to find out that we have deducted an additional 20% to 100% off of their already low stringing bill. We call these unannounced Customer Appreciation nights and we hold them once a week every week.
During these random, unannounced customer appreciation events, we check five major review sites while we are stringing each customer’s racquet. If we see five-star reviews that match the customer’s name, we knock off 20% for each. This is our way of showing our appreciation for customers who are out there saying nice things about us.
Bulk Stringing
Schools, groups and clubs can enjoy the benefit of strength in numbers because they can access our bulk stringing programs. In this program, the cost can drop to as low as $10.00 per racquet. Contact us at orders@racquetnetwork.com for more information.
Price is not everything, of course. Most of our players still want custom stringing so that they can have their racquet customized to their individual specifications. Therefore also offer custom and express options. The good news is that players who want custom stringing always have the option of pre-ordering online and getting online discounts that are not available to walk in customers.
Whatever your racquet stringing needs, Racquet Network can help. We offer more options at more price points than anybody else in Calgary. Whether you want it cheap, fast, generic or customized, we have the answer. And if you help us build our business, we will help you save even more in return.
If you are planning to play long term, purchase a racquet from a pro shop that stocks replacement parts. In deciding which racquet you should choose for squash, you first question should be this: how often do I intend to play?
If the answer is: I am not sure I will even be playing squash six months from now, then it really doesn’t matter which racquet you buy nor does it matter where you buy it from.
If, however, the answer is: I intend to play often because I love this game and want to commit to it, then the best racquet for you is one that you can repair.
In case you don’t already know this: squash racquets break. It’s not usually the frame that breaks, although those will break sometimes too. Most often, the parts that break are the grommets and the bumper guards.
Once these parts break, your racquet become a string eaters. The older it gets, the more string it eats and the more it costs to maintain.
Replacing these parts is essential if you want to keep your overall stringing costs down.
So the first question you should ask yourself about choosing a squash racquet is: how often to I intend to play. If the answer is “lots” then you want to get a racquet that you can get parts for.
Almost automatically, this leads to one important conclusion: avoid general sporting goods stores. Most of the squash racquets in these stores are SMUs or Special Make Ups.
Special Make Ups are racquets that look almost identical to the brand’s core products, but are specially made for the general sporting goods store. These racquets are not available to pro shops, specialty stores or competitors. This means that the parts to repair them are not available either.
So if your goal is to buy a squash racquet you can repair, you’d better think carefully about where to buy it. Pro shops and specialty racquet stores tend to stock parts for the racquets they sell. At least, the good ones do.
Unlike general sporting goods stores which only want your racquet business, pro shops and racquet stores want your stringing business. In order to earn your business, they sell both the racquets and the parts needed to repair them. This saves you money and gives you an opportunity play with your favorite racquet for several years.
Supported Squash Racquets
Racquet Network supports all racquets in the Tecnifibre ™ Carboflex series. Customers who purchase racquets in this series from us can count on parts support for the three years the racquet is available plus up to three additional years after the racquet is discontinued.
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.
When a string breaks, don’t assume that your stringer did something wrong. Here at Racquet Network, our stringers re-string nearly 2000 racquets a year. Less than a dozen racquets a year come back for warranty repairs.
This means that 99.994% of the racquets we repair are fine while 0.006% experience premature string breakage.
Yet in almost every one of the 0.006% of cases where strings break prematurely, the customer wants to blame us for doing something wrong. They seem to believe that when a string breaks, it has to be somebody’s fault.
This is a primer for those folks. The purpose of this article is to share our considerable experience about why strings break and to help players understand why this happens to them.
Don’t Take it Personally
The first thing to understand is that it’s not personal. Nobody is picking on you. It’s not a conspiracy.
All strings break eventually. Sometimes they break the first time you use them. Sometimes they last for years. When a racquet is strung, nobody knows how long it is going to last.
Your racquet might be in the 99.994% that are fine or it might be in the 0.006% that break prematurely. There is simply no way to know.
Even a perfect racquet that is perfectly strung by the world’s best stringer with the world’s best string on the world’s best stringing machine under perfect conditions can break the very first time you hit a ball or a shuttle with it. That’s a coincidence, not a conspiracy.
That said, however, there are come common causes for string breakage that we see regularly.
Racquet Maintenance Issues
Most often, the problem is with the bumper guard or grommets on the racquet itself. If grommets are broken, the graphite from the frame will cut through the string. If you are using a soft multifilament string like Tecnifibre ™ 305 or DNAMX, your string life can be extremely short.
The same is true for broken bumper guards. If the string in a racquet is passing over jagged pieces of bumper guard, there is a high likelihood that your strings will break prematurely. This is also true if missing pieces of bumper are exposing the string to wall/floor strikes on the outside of the frame.
Customer Usage
The second most common cause of string breakage is directly related to how customers use string. In squash, for example, we commonly see problems with men who overpower their string by literally hitting the ball much harder than they need to.
In this case, the story goes something like this.
A guy buys a squash racquet with thick, low grade factory string. He plays squash for a while and learns to serve overhand and to hit the ball really, really hard. Since the factory strings that were in the racquet when he purchased it are thick and designed for durability rather than playability, the player experiences no consequences for hitting this hard.
Eventually, however, the strings in the racquet break and the player brings the racquet in for re-stringing. For whatever reason, he decides to go with a highly playable string like Tecnifibre 305 or DNAMX, which are both playable but not very durable. So to nobody’s surprise, he goes out onto the court, pounds his first serve and immediately breaks his expensive new string.
Nobody is at fault here. This is simply physics. The strength of the player overpowers the strength of the string. This string is designed for professional squash players who consistently hit the ball in the centre of the stringbed. It is not designed for overhead pounders who hit the ball hard and off centre.
This is our second most common cause of string breakage; it is a player/string mismatch. The player and the string are both fine on their own; they are just wrong for each other.
This player needs a durable string, not a playable string. Once this is determined, we can advise players in this group to go with a more durable string, like Ashaway ™ Supernick XL Titanium.
The important thing to understand here is that nobody can know that the player and the string are wrong for each other until they try to play together. This is a matter of trial and error. Until they try, the error cannot be detected.
Conclusion
So the next time your string breaks prematurely, please don’t jump immediately to the conclusion that your stringer did something wrong. Given how we do things in our shop, this is highly unlikely and we suspect this is true for most professional stringers. A more likely explanation is that something else is at fault. Just bring your racquet in for us to look at. We will probably be able to figure out what happened and we will probably be able to help put you back into the 99.994% group.
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
