Sometimes, even racquets need a recharge.
Underneath the roars of Arthur Ashe Stadium, through a maze of manicured hallways lined with pictures of past champions, sits part of the team responsible for keeping them fresh: the tournament’s official racquet stringing service. The dark-walled room off the players’ warm-up room is lined with neat rows of stringing machines, each one home to an experienced stringer and hundreds of racquets from the top players throughout the tournament.
So what’s happening down there?
A lot. For those who aren’t familiar, the racquets of players at this level are restrung up to multiple times per round, a process that involves cutting out the existing strings and threading in new ones to the player’s unique specifications. Different players request different amounts of tension in their strings, and even the weather can change the type of requests that come into the stringing room. Players sometimes request higher tension in their strings when it’s hot out, or lower when it’s cold.
The tension of the strings can impact many angles of a player’s performance, from power to accuracy. Given the importance of a job well done, it’s impressive to note that the large majority of players in Queens this year, 95% to the estimate of the US Open’s stringing room “team captain” Dustin Tankersley, use the 22 members of the team to refresh their racquets during the event.
“We’re not determining whether they win or lose,” Tankersley said of the effect of his team’s stringing. “But we do have an impact on it, I think.”
And the players happily drop their racquets into the team’s hands. Whether they’re requesting a re-stringing in between rounds or mid-match, a situation that warrants a quicker a turn-around time (18 minutes maximum), they keep a constant flow of racquets heading towards the stringing team—hundreds every day.
"We’re not determining whether they win or lose. But we do have an impact on it, I think.”
To ensure consistency when the restrung racquets are sent back into the hands of their owners, the same stringer will be responsible for the restringing of a player’s racquet for their entire Flushing run. Players expected to be in the tournament for longer are assigned to stringers who will be in the stringing room for its duration. And after enough time pulling string for the same players, this system does sometimes knot players and stringers together.
One of the US Open’s stringers, hailing from Japan, has developed a relationship with Japanese player and former No. 4 Kei Nishikori after years of taking care of his racquets from behind an Ashe stringing machine.
“He always strings for Nishikori when he’s here, for years and years,” Tankersley said. “Nishikori will actually come to the desk and talk to him. … We have stringers that have been doing it for so long that they know players and they’ll interact with players a little bit more.”
And the world of career stringing is a tight-knit one. The stringing team tying off knots in Flushing is the same one that prepares the racquets for the red clay at Roland Garros in May. Though they take care of half of the Slams on the circuit, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the team hails heavily from either tournament’s home countries of the United States and France.
“It’s pretty international,” Tankersley said of the experienced stringing team they’ve assembled. “We have 13 different countries represented. … We have guys from Chinese Taipei, Hong Kong, France, Italy, kind of all over the world.”
Making it to a Slam is as much a career pinnacle for the stringers as it is for the players themselves. Just like the top stars, stringers earn their stripes by putting in time at smaller events, weaving through stringing rooms at ATP Challengers and ITF World Tennis Tour tournaments before getting their chance with the racquets of the sport’s top stars.
However, with stringers spending so much time together in the stringing room during a tournament, experience is not the only factor in their ability to get a job in Queens. Tankersley said that the team’s training process, a four-day stretch at the beginning of the tournament that is used to train and onboard about four new stringers each year, goes beyond just getting comfortable at the machines.
“It’s from just getting to know them, how they interact, and how they are personality wise, whether they’re going to be a good fit for the team,” he said of that time period with new team members.
“It’s not just about being good,” Tankersley emphasized. “It’s about fitting in the team and the way we want things done.”
For more than two weeks, this year’s team has been clicking along, side-by-side at their machines. They each make it through 20 to 25 racquets per day, according to Tankersley, and with five days of play left, there are still many racquets to go.
