Head to the practice court area at the All England Lawn Tennis Club, home to the Wimbledon tennis championships, go down an alleyway beyond the warm-up room and the crèche, and you’ll find a small cabin with a large reception desk and 14 grey machines manned by staff in blue polo shirts.
This is the stringing cabin, and it’s one of the busiest places in the club throughout Wimbledon. Almost every player will make their way to the reception desk during the course of the tournament and drop off their racquets before a match to be restrung. The process is required to keep the tension on the strings high: at the highest levels of elite sport, making sure your equipment is in ideal condition can mean the difference between victory and defeat.
Apollo Leisure has been the contractor for racquet stringing at Wimbledon since 2009. In that first year, it strung 2,300 racquets for players. Last year, it strung 4,008. On July 2, the first day of this year’s championships, the number of racquets Apollo’s stringers handled increased five per cent. “Players are getting more racquets done per match,” explains Andy Phillips, Apollo’s stringing service manager at the championships until this year, when he has taken a job in the company’s offices.
Not all players use Apollo’s services; some, such as Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic, choose their own, personal stringers. Federer brings nine racquets on court every time he plays. Each one has to be prepared by a professional stringer such as Paul Skipp.
Skipp is a freelance racquet stringer, employed by Apollo for the duration of the tournament. The company has a number of freelance stringers working for it in shifts, but only 14 can work at a time because of space constraints in the stringing cabin. Skipp also works for other companies at the British and French Open, Indian Wells and Madrid. “It’s not as glamorous as it seems,” he says.
On Thursday, when we speak, Skipp’s day began at 6am, when he was confronted with 14 racquets that needed stringing for the morning session. He’d be there until around 10pm that evening. “We do that for around 12 of the next 14 days,” he says.
Players visit the stringing cabin with specific requests. Racquet strings can be tightened to a different tension depending on personal preference. This year, players are requesting their strings be tightened more than usual. “A tighter restring gives you more control – important when the weather is warmer and the balls fly quicker,” Phillips says.
The average tension for a tennis racquet is in the high 40 or early 50lb (22.5kg) range (this denotes the weight at which the tennis string is being pulled taut in a restringing machine), though other players veer towards the extremes. Daniel Nesta, a Canadian doubles player, asks for his racquets to be strung at around 16lbs – looser than a badminton racket. Jamaican-German player Dustin Brown asks for his string tension to be around 36 kilos, near 80lbs.
Players can change their preferences throughout the tournament. “Some players are fickle, looking at weather conditions, court conditions, when they’re playing during the day, the type of ball, and they make adjustments to their tension as they see fit,” Skipp says.
Some players also ask for specific stringers to work on their racquets. Rafael Nadal has his own personal stringer, Xavi Segura Balague, whom he requests at each tournament. Balague joined Apollo last year. “Players normally want the same stringer if they’re winning; they want to carry on that way so it’s exactly the same,” Phillips says.
This is in large part superstition. But while the stringing service – done mostly using a machine that rises up to the stringers’ belly button and holds the racquet in place while pulling the string taut – is partly automated, there are individual quirks that each stringer can bring to a racket. “They’re only going to be marginal differences, but there can be some,” Phillips explains.
Those minute differences come from the manual aspect of the stringing. The main strings, which run from the top to the bottom of the racket head, are inserted by machine, then the cross strings are woven by hand. The choice of string material can have an impact on racquet performance: some players prefer polyester strings (which allow more control over shots), while others choose “natural gut” strings, made from cow intestine. The natural fibres in those strings provide more power to shots. Other players mix the two.
Some players can be very particular in their requests. “You may have to put the racquet on the machine in a certain way, you may have to put the knots in a certain location,” says Skipp. “Most players are straightforward. But some are a little bit more off the wall, so to speak.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
