5 Ways by Which You Can Customize Your Tennis Rackets

A tennis racquet selection guide may help you find the perfect racket, but customizing your tennis racket is the way to go if you are not satisfied with the quality and features of ready-made rackets. Many touring professionals play with a customized racket, so it is not unusual to have yours customized, too. Customizing a racket may occur during its manufacturing or after-market. In any case, the goal is to have it tailored to the player’s unique physique, playing style, and game objectives. Customizing your tennis rackets may help you gain an edge on the court. Here are five ways to do it:

• Customize the racket’s balance and weight – This involves adding weight to any strategic location on your racket to control its overall distribution of weight, a factor that determines how the racket will play, feel, and swing. Weight will affect control, stability, power, arm safety, and the location of the sweet spot, too. Likewise, it will determine the maneuverability of your racket. 

• Change the strings – Another popular way to customize tennis rackets is by changing the strings. There are many different strings to choose from, from natural gut to synthetic, and in some cases, they come in many different colors, too.

• Customizing with lead tape – Lead tape comes packaged as strips of lead that are one-fourth of one-half inch wide, in pre-cut strips or rolls with sticky backing. It is applied to the frame of the racket on both sides of the strings. A stringer may apply a ½-inch wide tape while stringing the racket with the grommets protruding through it. Adding lead tape to a tennis racket will provide more weight to it and increase your shot’s power. Apply lead tape at the six o’ clock area of the racket’s frame to add weight without affecting the balance.

• Add lead tape for stability – If the tennis racquet selection guide led you to a racket that lacks stability, you can increase that factor by adding lead tape, too. This time, lead increases the weight on the sweet spot to minimize vibration and twisting from any off-center hit. Tape the nine and three o’ clock areas of the racket to achieve stability.

• Boost plow through with tape – Apply two eight-inch strips of tungsten customization tape to the racket’s inner hoop at the 12 o’clock area to boost the total mass by 0.2 ounces. This means two balance points, a 20-point jump in the swingweight, and less head-light.