Category: Tennis Racquets

Expert advice about tennis racquets from Racquet Network in Calgary.

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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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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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Choosing Racquets: Do Brands Matter?

Hammers

Racquet Network has been helping customers choose racquets since 2004. Over the years, we have seen thousands of frames (and thousands of features) come and go. One year the, hot feature is a “flex point”. The next year it’s “titanium”. The year after that, it’s “recessed grommet technology”.

The truth is that some of these hot features are genuine technological innovations but most of them, unfortunately, are just marketing pitches. Every manufacturer wants you to believe that their frame is special. If you believe it is special, you will want to buy it. Therefore they are constantly tweaking their frames and adding features in order to swing more customers their way.

Sadly, too many customers fall for the marketing. Equally sad is the fact that so many customers buy particular racquets just because they are endorsed by celebrity athletes.

Racquets are like hammers. They are tools designed to accomplish specific tasks. If you are building a house, you want to use claw hammer. If you are shaping metal, you want a ball peen hammer. If you are breaking up concrete, you want a sledge hammer. But whether your hammer is made by Stanley, Craftsman or Dewalt is not really important. All three of these companies make all three of these hammers. Picking the right tool for the job matters much more than the brand.

The same is true for racquets. Wilson ™, Babolat ™, Head, Yonex ™ and Tecnifibre ™ all make tennis racquets. They make racquets for casual players, they make racquets for recreational players and they make racquets for professionals. All of these companies make racquets for doubles and racquets for singles. And they all make racquets that work for both.

At Racquet Network, we focus on carrying brands that are very well made. We avoid junk brands. We avoid brands who spend their money on celebrity endorsements and favor brands who spend their money on research and development. By doing this, we ensure a high level of satisfaction amongst our customers. In other words, we do this because we want happy customers who come back over and over again.

Just as hammers are tools, racquets are containers for string. Picking the right frame for the job (singles, doubles or both) is important, but it’s only half the battle. Once you have the right frame, you have to customize it to your playing style and frequency. Nothing breaks our hearts faster than watching a customer spend $300 on a racquet only to have it strung with $10.00 string. We would much rather see customers spend $200 on the frame and $40.00 on good string.

Brand, as we said earlier, is not the most important consideration in choosing a racquet. Nor is a celebrity endorsement. Our staff are trained to ask new customers a series of questions in order to narrow things down to the proper category in just few minutes. Once we have the category right, we find something in the right grip size. After that, we pick out a few frames to consider in detail.

Once the frame is in hand, we start the process of customizing it for our customers. First we ask a series of questions that help us figure out what the customer wants or needs the string to do. Once we have that information we pick out three strings at three different price points and consider them in more detail.

At the end of the process, we are certain that the customer has a frame suited to their general needs that is precisely customized for their particular needs as a player. This is true whether customers play tennis, squash, badminton or racquetball. And it is for this reason above all that we have the highest overall rate of customer satisfaction in Calgary.

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Do I need to Replace my Prince Tennis Racquet?

PRINCE O3 BEAST 100 (300) TENNIS FRAME
Bring your Prince racquet into our store for an expert assessment.
My Prince ™ tennis racquet is old. Do I need to replace it? It’s a question we hear every week from customers with racquets that are sometimes older than our staff.

In more than half of the cases the answer is no. An old racquet is not necessarily a bad racquet just as a new racquet is not necessarily a good racquet.

If you are comfortable with a racquet and you play well with it, why change it? As long as the strings are replaced and the grip is maintained, the racquet can stay in service for years.

All of that starts to change when one of two things happens: either the bumper guard is damaged or grommets start breaking off. When either of these two things happen, the racquet will start to damage its own strings. Eventually, this can turn a trusted old friend into a nasty old string eater that costs a fortune to maintain.

At this point, your best course of action is either to replace the worn out parts or to replace the racquet. And since it is impossible to get parts for old Prince tennis racquets, the only realistic option is to replace the racquet.

Fortunately, we offer a Try One Before You Buy One program that allows customers to test drive a variety of racquets for a month. At the end of the month, they can choose a new racquet that they feel comfortable with.

So when the time comes to retire an old friend, come into our southwest Calgary store and talk to an expert. We can help you find a friendly new racquet that will be with you for the next two decades.

Prince Tennis Racquets

Racquet Selector 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.
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Need Some Help Picking a New Prince Racquet?

PRINCE O3 BEAST 100 (300) TENNIS FRAME
Our in-store experts can help you upgrade your Prince tennis racquet.
Most Prince ™ fans fell in love with their Prince tennis racquets in the late 80s or early 90s. They have a long term relationship with Prince and aren’t interested in changing now. Unfortunately, this also means that a lot of Prince fans are playing with tennis racquets that are more than 20 years old.

The decision to upgrade is sometimes a painful one. Sometimes, it is the realization that replacement parts are just not available for racquets made this long ago.

In other instances, it’s just time for a change. Players love their old racquets, but the frames are older than their adult children. So it’s time for an upgrade. It’s time for something new.

Regardless of your reason for buying a new Prince tennis racquet, our in-store experts can help. Simply bring your old racquet into the store for a consultation with one of our experts. We will look at the specifications of the new frames and tell you which of the current models is most like the one you have.

We can’t recommend a specific racquet for you because have a firm company policy in place that prohibits our experts from recommending specific brands or specific models. However, our experts can answer questions about specifications and other details that will help you make an informed decision.

In-store customers also have the option of test driving Prince racquets in our Try One Before You Buy One program. Once they sign up, they have a month to try a variety of racquets for up to one week at a time. At the end of the month, they can choose the racquet that they are most comfortable playing with.

Prince Tennis Racquets

Racquet Selector 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.