Category: Tennis String

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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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Babolat String Reels for Independent Racquet Stringers

Babolat Tennis String Logo

Are you an independent racquet stringer or teaching pro working from home or a small pro shop? Can’t afford to stock a lot of reels and string sets but still want to offer your customers a good selection of string?

Join our network of independent racquet stringers and buy your string by the foot. No need to stock full reels. No need to buys dozens of string sets just to get maximum discounts. We use the collective buying power of our network to keep prices down for everybody.

All you need to do to join our network is link to our main website from your racquet stringing website. If you are willing to do that (and if you are willing to say nice things about us) we will set you up and supply you with string by the foot.

Below is a selection of Babolat ™ tennis string loops we currently offer off the reel. Remember, this is just one brand. We offer many brands.

The vast majority of orders ship out to independent racquet stringers by letter mail the following business day. The shipping cost is $2.00 per loop.

Babolat Tennis String Reels

String Selector For a full list of racquet string in this category, please check out our ONLINE STRING SELECTOR. You can sort by sport, gauge, brand, and more.
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Kicking Plastics: Options for Racquet Sports Players Who Care

Organic Racquet String for Tennis, Squash and Badminton

If you are the kind of player who thinks about the impact of plastics on the environment, then you should know what your options are in the category of organic strings. Unlike plastic strings which can take hundreds of years to break down, organic strings are animal byproducts and break down quickly and completely.

Babolat ™ leads the way in natural strings, of course. They started in France (1871) as a string company making strings for musical instruments. Now they are the world’s leading producer of natural gut racquet strings for tennis, squash and badminton.

Once alone in this field, Babolat has recently been joined by Wilson ™ and Luxilon ™, both of whom offer their own versions of natural gut string for tennis racquets.

The vast majority of recreational tennis players can play with fully organic sets. In other words, they can play with natural gut on both the mains and the crosses of their tennis racquets. So they will will want to consider these options:

Organic Tennis String Sets

Advanced intermediate players and extremely hard servers may find they are breaking their strings too often after switching to natural gut. These players may want to switch to hybrid sets in the category below.

Hybrid string sets feature plastic strings on the mains and natural gut on the crosses. This provides durability where durability is needed (on the mains) but opts for organic string on the crosses, which are least likely to break.

50% Organic Tennis String Sets

While nobody makes an actual set of natural gut strings for squash racquets, there is no difference between tennis and squash string other than the gauge. Typically, squash string is 17 gauge while tennis string is 16 gauge.

However, there are lots of tennis players who string their tennis racquets with 17 gauge and many squash players who string their racquets with 16 gauge string. So don’t worry about the label “tennis string”. Squash players should simply look at the gauge. And if they find they are breaking 17 gauge too often, then they should switch to 16 gauge.

Organic Squash String Sets

Squash players who switch to 16 gauge string and find they are still breaking strings too often should come into the store and talk to us. While there are no hybrid sets for squash, we can put together hybrid options off the reel that use half sets of natural gut on the crosses and plastic strings on the mains.

Badminton players who want to kick plastics to the curb don’t need to worry about gauges because Babolat makes several grades of badminton string in a few different gauges.

Organic Badminton String Sets

As with squash players, badminton players may have to experiment with different options in order to find a combination that holds up to steady use. And again, as with squash players, badminton players who are breaking strings too often should talk to our racquet techs in store. We can put together some hybrid options off the reel for anybody that is serious about reducing their use of plastic strings.

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Tennis Racquet Stringing Options for Competitive Juniors

Goran Vukovic

Why do so many of Alberta’s top competitive junior tennis athletes and their parents choose to string at Racquet Network?

Probably because our expert staff and coaches work with parents to protect the health of their junior athletes.

Keep in mind that we have been working with junior tennis players and their families since 2004. Over the years, we have watched these junior athletes grow up, compete, earn scholarships, graduate from college and start families of their own. Some of our athletes even have their own children enrolled in tennis programs today.

In spite of the best efforts from these players, their parents and their many coaches over many years, not one of these Calgary hopefuls ever turned pro.

Why? Because this is Calgary. We keep our fingers crossed for all of these kids, of course, but the odds of anybody from Calgary ever turning pro are very slim indeed.

The most common outcome that we have seen over the years are junior tennis players who become young adults with all of the injuries and nagging aches and pains of the pros but none of the accolades.

It breaks our heart to hear about fifteen-year-olds who cannot sleep on their right sides due extreme to shoulder pain.

That’s why our emphasis is always on who-the-athlete-is-right-now, not what-we-want-the-athlete-to-become.

Our experts never recommend that juniors use the same strings or racquets that adult pros use. Both of these are way to stiff for undeveloped muscles and joints and can lead to persistent injury and chronic pain.

Our advice to juniors is to stay away from these things until they are adults. In the meantime, use gear that is designed for athletes their age.

Polyester strings are a great example of this. Pros use polyester because their swings are extremely fast. The top players in major tournaments can also have tens of thousands of dollars riding on a single swing of the racquet. So they cannot risk having a string break at an unexpected moment.

Juniors under 14, even the best of them, are not as strong as adults. They don’t need polyester strings. Moreover, the long term injury effects of using polyester strings at too young of an age are well documented.

Our advice to junior players and their parents is to stick with multifilament string until they turn 14 or until they are swinging so hard and breaking string so often that they have no other choice.

In the meantime, Racquet Network has developed a graduated stringing program with ten different levels. Level 1 starts juniors off with soft thin string suitable for 8-10 year olds. Each succeeding level above Level 1 has slightly more durable string. The final level, Level 10 has the most durable multifilament string we can find.

Most new players entering the program start at Level 1. If the string at that level lasts for two weeks, then we consider it the right level. If not, then they move up a level and they keep moving up levels until the reach a combination that lasts two weeks or more before breaking.

Once the find their level, they stay at that level until they outgrow it. Once their swing speed develops beyond that level and they start breaking string again regularly, it’s time to move a little higher on the chart.

The more they play, the stronger athletes get. So if your athlete is breaking strings more often than they were a few months ago, it may be a sign that they are improving and hitting harder. Our level systems helps parents and athletes find the right string combination for their current level. It also gives players who are improving an idea of where to go next.

At every level, our goal is to provide junior athletes with a string that is strong enough to handle their power but soft enough to protect their growing joints and developing soft tissues. This is the best way we know to minimize chronic shoulder pain which many advanced athletes first start to experience in their third year of competitive tennis.