When it comes to a tennis player’s equipment, there are few things more important than the racquet. Hand-in-hand with the racquet is the string, the oft-overlooked but essential part of the setup.
While a player’s individual style of play and the racquet a player uses is important, it’s the strings that help determine everything from power to accuracy. This year, as with the previous eight US Open championships, a team from Wilson Sporting Goods is on hand to manage the tournament’s restringing needs.
Ron Rocchi, the advanced innovation manager of player insights and tour at Wilson, manages a 20-person team that features stringers from 11 different countries – with a combined 153 years of experience.
“Our role is to provide the very best possible service for any player in the tournament and make sure that when it comes to their equipment, the racquets are strung as consistently and quickly as possible,” Rocchi said.
Singles players are on an alternating match-practice schedule, meaning if they have their first-round match on the first Monday of the tournament, they will practice on Tuesday, play their second-round match on Wednesday and practice again on Thursday. Players typically drop off between two and four racquets the morning of a practice session and then around eight racquets with slightly adjusted specifications later that day after so they’re ready for their match the following afternoon.
Once a player drops off his or her racquets for the first time, a work order is created for each one and they are assigned to one stringer. Only this stringer, on his individual machine, will string that player’s racquets throughout the tournament.
“It is still an artistic craft with cadences that vary slightly from stringer to stringer,” said Rocchi. “In a tournament like this where a player will go up half a pound [in tension] or down half a pound based on the atmospheric conditions and court speed and temperature, you need to have the same person stringing their racquets because they will notice the difference.
“You can have every machine set to the same setting, but then there’s the human element – the speed at which they work, how much time they take between pulling the string, how tightly they clamp the racquet, where they clamp the racquet – that is what I call the cadence.”
For the process, stringers cut out the existing strings and then feed about 38 feet of new string – either natural gut, polyester or a hybrid combination of both – through holes in the frame of the racquet and pull it tight until it reaches the tension specified by the player. The lower the tension, the more power the racquet generates, because the strings act like a trampoline and helps the ball rebound more. By contrast, higher tensions give a player more control.
Once a racquet has been strung, the manufacturer’s logo is painted onto the strings using a template. Then it’s wrapped in a bag and placed on an alphabetized outbound rack ready for players to collect. Each stringing costs $30.
A stringer will string a racquet in around 20 minutes, although this number can drop as low as 14 minutes when a player sends a racquet restrung in the middle of a match. These in-match requests supersede any other request a stringer is working on.
Rocchi said his team will normally string racquets anywhere from 42 pounds to 68 pounds. Serena Williams strings her racquet about 65 pounds, Rafael Nadal is around 55 pounds and the Bryan brothers are each around 45 pounds.
More racquets are being strung and restrung than ever before. When Wilson first became the official stringer of the tournament in 2006, the team strung 2,597 sticks. This number has risen every year and last year reached 4,408. Rocchi expects to surpass 4,500 this year and said it’s not uncommon for players to restring more than 30 racquets throughout a two-week tournament.
In total, more than 30 miles of string, provided by each player at the start of the tournament, will be used at the US Open this year. That’s enough string to go from Arthur Ashe Stadium to the Statue of Liberty … almost three times.
“Strings as a whole will greatly affect how a racquet plays,” Rocchi said. “The needs of these athletes are very different from the needs of the average player. Average players need to generate much more power. These elite players swing much harder and faster and they need strings that will respond and keep the ball in the court.
“People are amazed at the amount of effort that goes into this service that really goes unseen,” Rocchi said. “You have to be the type of person who can flourish in a stressful condition. You don’t do it for the recognition. If nobody says anything, you’ve done a good job.”
