TENNIS NEWS & HAPPENINGS
By Nancy Ansboury

Nancy’s Tennis Tip of the Month
How often should I restring ?
A general rule of thumb is to string as many times in a year as you play in a week but no less than twice a year. Although this restringing advice is most often quoted and a number of tennis pro shops use this formula when calculating the restring date for your racquet, how useful is this? If you never break a string why do you need to restring your racquet twice a year? All tennis strings begin to lose tension from the moment they are strung and continue to lose tension over their lifetime. The more often you play the faster the tension loss but even if you don’t play your strings will become soft and need to be restrung.

Selecting the best string to use is a balance between the strings durability and its resiliency or playability (power and control). The resiliency of strings is a measure of how much the string stretches on impact and how much force it exerts on the tennis ball as it springs back. Strings that are too resilient will stretch too far on impact and break sooner. Big hitters and especially big spin hitters will need to choose a less resilient (stiffer) string to get sufficient durability (and to prevent over stretching at impact). So we need to match the string to our style of play paying special attention to how much power we need to generate from the strings versus how much we generate from our swing. If your strings are too durable you are giving up power and control in favor of durability. If you plan to restring your racquet twice a year and your strings are durable enough to last several years you may be trading power and control for durability that you will never use. You may want to experiment with strings that offer greater resiliency.

A good starting point is to use the same strings you are playing with now but choose a thinner gauge string, i.e. if you are using a 16 gauge synthetic gut consider using a 17 or 18 gage string of the same type. You can also stick to the same material (Nylon or Polyester) and construction (Multifilment, Solid Core, Monofilament) but choose a string that is less stiff. If these strings break too often for you then you can move back in the other direction until you find the right balance between durability and playability to suit your needs.

24 HOUR STRINGING IS OFFERED IN THE PRO SHOP