How tennis stars get the rackets, strings and tensions they need for Wimbledon success

THE ALL ENGLAND CLUB, LONDON — On the first day of Wimbledon, Ed Day, a university student from just outside London, ran 17.5 kilometers across the All England Club. Those kilometers took him from the on-site stringing center, which is near the players’ practice facility to various courts around the ground.

His mission?

Delivering rackets to players who have requested a restring during their match. Day, who along with the other runners who are part of the Court Services team wears a high-visibility vest for the job, has to weave in and out of tennis fans to get where he is going as fast as he possibly can. He has just returned from a sprint to No. 3 Court, and will soon be back out in the heat dodging spectators with another racket in his hand.

“This one is for Anastasia Zakharova, that one’s for Luciano Darderi,” he says. “We have a special tunnel that gets us to No. 3 Court, but after that you are on your own with the masses.”

Day worked at Wimbledon last year and says his highlight was delivering a racket to Emma Raducanu, whose coach for this edition, Mark Petchey, has just picked up three rackets ahead of her second-round match against Markéta Vondroušová.

That’s how the players get their rackets back. The runners also have to bring them for restringing in the first place. Each racket is logged by the strings required and the tension. The old strings will be cut off and a stringer will get to work.

On day one they had 50 restrings mid-match and 664 across the 256 players who needed them doing before or after matches. By the end of women’s semifinal day, 6,400 rackets had passed through the stringing center, which is run by Babolat. Last year’s total was 6,188.

Twenty five stringers work on 23 machines, from 7 a.m. until shortly after play concludes for the day.

Among those in the workshop on day three is Paul Skipp from Portsmouth. The 55-year-old has been stringing rackets since he was 18. This is his 20th time working at Wimbledon, and when finds him, he is in the middle of restringing the racket of American player Tommy Paul.

“I’ve strung for all the top names. I strung Andy Murray’s racket for his first match at Wimbledon in 2005 and I strung Carlos Alcaraz for his first time at Wimbledon too.

“I’ve strung a racket in probably 10-and-a-half minutes,” he says, calmly threading the string through. “That’s when it has come in from court and someone’s asked for it really quickly. But normal time is around 17 minutes per racket.

“We try to keep the same stringer for each player, to be consistent. Players like that too especially if they need little changes to be made to tension. Most of the top players won’t be demanding too much. You will actually get stranger requests from players who are maybe a little bit further down the rankings like where to tie knots or wanting the logo in a slightly different place.”

Manuela Villa Topple knows all about the detailed levels of some requests. The 20-year-old is part of a small team who gives each and every racket their finishing touch by painting on a branded logo.

“After the rackets get strung, they bring it down to our station and we find the right stencil, the right color and we draw on the logos with solvent paint,” she says.

“Sometimes they have two logos, two different colors depending on their sponsorship deals. We have to be very careful we don’t get it wrong because if we do and it’s a certain string type like natural gut [which is made from the intestines of cows] that racket has to be restrung entirely because we can’t rub the ink off.”

Tennis strings come in three main categories: natural gut; multifilament, which is synthetic but made up of thousands of fibres woven together per string; and polyester, which is a single fibre per string. Polyesters, and some multifilaments, come in different geometries; some have a rough surface for increased spin production. All strings come in different thicknesses: the thinner, the more powerful and comfortable; the thicker, the more controlled and durable.

Natural gut is the most expensive, the most powerful, comfortable and plushest; polyester strings are cheaper and offer the most spin and control, but are less comfortable; multifilaments are somewhere in between.

If these descriptions sound sweeping, that’s because they are. Tennis players, from recreational to professional, are very particular about their strings. Some — including Roger Federer — will not string their racket with just one string, but two. This is a hybrid set-up, offering the benefits of two different types of string by putting one in the mains (the strings that run vertically, parallel to the racket handle) and the crosses (which run perpendicular to the mains.)

And once they have chosen their strings, they have to choose a tension. As with strings, there is a general range — between 21 kg (46 lbs) and 25 kg (55 lbs) — but some players are outliers. Adrian Mannarino of France plays down at 8.6 kg (19 lbs) on occasion, which is like playing with a trampoline.

“Forty pounds is about the max you can do,” Babolat employee Josh Newton explains while spinning a racket around.

“I’m not sure I’ve ever had anyone over 40 as that’s the max for the machine. The tighter it is the less power off the racket but the ball comes off the strings faster. It has a sensation of popping off the strings but it has less velocity than if you string it looser. Looser is like a trampoline so it sinks in and then it bounces off.”

Tension also needs to be adjusted to the weather. In the heat of the early rounds and the semifinals, players will have strung slightly tighter to mitigate the increased liveliness of the balls and the grass. They will have several rackets in their bag during matches, strung at different tensions with half a pound or a pound between them.

“They’re usually in batches of 12 maybe every few months they change them because of the constant hitting and restringing which will affect the racket a little bit as well,” Skipp says. “The heat will have affected them here. The players may find they need more rackets, with tension in the strings dropping quicker.”

They will also customize their stencils. Red, black and white are the three main colors, but last year’s women’s singles champion, Barbora Krejčíková, likes to use silver on her Head racket. She takes her own silver paint with her to each tournament. When British duo Eden Silva and Joshua Paris paired up in the mixed doubles they both went logo-free which is rare.

Iga Świątek, who will play Amanda Anisimova in the women’s final, likes to have her Tecnifibre logo painted as low down on her racket as possible, while Kateřina Siniaková, who won the mixed doubles with partner Sem Verbeek, always wants her red Wilson logo to be painted from the fourth string from the top rather than the fifth.

“She came in and said: “I know it sounds crazy but for me that just works.” Apparently she can see when the logo’s wearing off more when it’s on the fourth string but for some it is superstition too,” says Villa Topple, whose highlight has been adding logos to fellow Italian and men’s world No. 1 Jannik Sinner’s racket.

“We try to help the player every time. If they have a special request we will try to do it,” says Eric Ferrazzi, head of racket service for Babolat.

The stringing center serves over 700 players at Wimbledon and has been doing so since the company took over the racket services in 2022. Not all players will use the service here: seven-time Wimbledon champion Novak Djokovic uses a private stringer.

With just four singles matches left, the organized chaos of the early rounds has given way to a calmer environment. But Day and his hi-vis will still be ready to run, just in case one of the remaining stars needs a racket with which to play the biggest point of their career.

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

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