It’s said that Novak Djokovic plays a tennis racket based a fifteen year old Head frame design. When I heard this and considered the fact for a few moments I thought to myself, the tech hasn’t advanced. If it had, Djokovic and the rest of the high-level players would be taking advantage.

Now this struck me as odd since tennis tech, as evidenced by string and rackets, advanced significantly sometime during the Agassi era. It’s easy to imagine how the move from wood to metal to graphite and the simultaneous evolution of strings, from gut to multifilaments, co-polys and polyester monofilaments, changed tennis forever, if maybe not for better.

I’ve come to describe tennis as an oppositional striking game, approximating some of the  confrontation elements that take place between a pitcher and hitter. Other than appropriate footwear, the racket is pretty much all the equipment a player brings into battle. In high level professional tennis, rackets are quite nearly disposable. To the enthusiast they are alternately sources of fascination or confusion.

The mechanics of a tennis racket are fairly simple. This is not to say that designing or building a racket is simple. Contemporary tennis rackets are the flower of post-industrial revolution advances in materials science and mass production. In some ways they are equatable to a contemporary golf driver. Both are component devices; one comprised of racket frame and string and the other of driver head and glued shaft. A driver’s playability is determined by the integration of shaft/head/player. In tennis, it’s obviously racket/strings/player. Both golf and tennis have well-developed industries to research, manufacture and market products but what do those wildly successful commercial efforts mean to the player?

I don’t want to get too carried away by ideas about the physics or mechanics of the tennis racket or the driver for that matter. Suffice it to say both improved very rapidly a few decades ago and both, today, have reached a kind of stasis. That stasis comes from a combination of two things. The first is the theoretic maximum of coefficient of restitution (COR, hereinafter). COR is the degree to which a modern driver face can deflect thereby allowing the ball to travel further assuming a given club head speed. So, virtually every modern professional golfer is using a driver head with essentially matched technology in terms of basic mechanics. I think the same thing is true when it comes to tennis rackets. The industry has pretty much figured it out. Now, this doesn’t mean all tennis rackets perform identically. They vary by length, weight and flexibility on at least two axis. The difficult and more interesting question is this: how do changes in those qualities affect a tennis player? 

Let me dodge that issue momentarily by shifting back to golf. If we regard Tiger Woods career as lasting roughly two decades, we will see that he started out using a driver that was pretty much from the decade that proceeded it. In other words, the next generation drivers being used today had not yet been developed by 1997. So, Tiger Woods when he first came onto the PGA Tour, used a driver (a King Cobra Deep Face 9 degrees, True Temper Dynamic Gold X100 shaft. The X100 shaft is steel, heavy steel at that. The driver’s steel head displaced somewhere around 210cc. A few years after that the driver boom occurred. The boom was caused by the simultaneous development of aluminum titanium alloys, which allowed the head size to balloon to 460cc and also the ability to maximize the mentioned coefficient of restitution. So, by the mid 2000s Tiger Woods would be using a driver with a graphite shaft and an aluminum / titanium alloy head that rode the edge of maximum allowable COR as regulated by the United States golf Association. 

By the mid 2000 driver technology for the most part had maxed out, both in terms of material and technology. Interestingly, if we make the obvious assumption that Novak Djokovic has access to the best equipment in the world, and further, that his racket of choice is based on a fifteen year old design, we can also conclude that tennis rackets, at least for the time being, have also been maxed out. So, back to the earlier question; how does this affect the average player whether a golfer or a tennis player? In both sports, I conclude that the technology advancements of the last fifteen to 20 years has been virtually irrelevant. Tiger Woods, at any point in his professional career, could have gone back to his 1997 steel-headed, steel- shafted driver with very few consequences. It is even arguable (and I have promoted the opinion) that the slight decrease in distance paired with the significant increase in control would have led him to even better play during that time of his career. As regards tennis, I doubt that any amateur player is likely to be disadvantaged by using a racket that’s even older than the one Novak Djokovic plays.