Racket Technologies
One of the trends in the past few years has been to increase the rebound in a racket, or in other words, waste less energy when striking the ball. The claims are that this gives you more power with less energy, the sweetspot is bigger, and all sorts of things of other claims.
So who here uses a Babolat racket with their woofer technology? Most Babolat rackets from the past 5 years have this technology. What about the Head rackets that use Piezoelectric fibers? These fibers convert stress into energy, basically stiffening the frame and reducing the vibrations that get to the handle and again, transferring more of that energy to the ball.
I think these technologies are great and they do actually achieve what they claim to a certain degree, but my question is, what about consistency?!! I demoed the Babolat Pure Drive and Pure Control in 2003 and one of the first things I noticed was the “trampoline” effect from the woofer technology. The ball was always sailing long whenever I took a serious swing at the ball, and it’s not just because I hit the sweetspot, it’s because the harder I swing, the more the string bed gives (duh…), but the rebound effect is multiplied. That’s my point in all this, these technologies make the equation (i.e.) “how hard I hit the ball = how hard the ball leaves the racket” => “how hard I hit the ball => 1.5 * how hard the ball leaves the racket”. That’s not a linear equation, and exactly what it feels like.
I applaud Wilson for refraining from adding technologies that increase the rebound rate, and just stiffened the racket uniformly. I have not played with the nCodes yet, so I can’t make any claims, but I can say that I love the uniformity in my shot power of my old Wilson ProStaff 6.1 Stretch.
So next time you demo a racket, look at what technologies they’re marketing, what is the claim their making? Compare that to how you think the ball is coming off the strings and your current racket may stay your favorite. Just food for thought…