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Save $200 Stringing Yonex Badminton Racquets

Great news for Yonex fans in Calgary. Our Yonex badminton racquet program just got even better.

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

Starting today, every customized Yonex ™ badminton 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.


Yonex Astrox Series


Racquet Network’s new badminton 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.


Yonex Duora Series


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 Yonex badminton racquet from us, we automatically include $200 worth of stringing upgrades.


Yonex Nanoray Series


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


Program Details


Our new badminton program, therefore, continues to be the best overall program in Calgary for badminton players who want to save time, save money and play with the best badminton 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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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.

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Why Do Strings Break?

Squash racquet with broken string
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.

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How to Save Money on Custom Racquet Stringing

Want to enjoy all of the benefits of custom racquet stringing without paying full price for everything? Try pre-ordering online. Then drop your racquet off whenever it’s convenient.

You will get exactly the same result as when you come into the store and place your order in person, but you will save money every time.

Pre-ordering your stringing this way allows us to save on staffing costs. So we can pass the savings on to you.

As an added bonus, our system will automatically send you a 10% discount on your next stringing purchase if you submit a review within 30 days.

That’s all there is to it. You already know what you want, so order it online and save some money. We will do the rest.