Tennis Rackets

Tennis Warehouse is a large online retailer of tennis equipment. This website has informative capsule summaries on each of the 245 tennis rackets (including junior rackets) that Tennis Warehouse sells.… Almost all of them have customer comments, and about 50 rackets have long, extremely detailed, hands-on reviews by the staff that include numerical ratings. The overall ratings range from a high of 85 for the Wilson K-Factor [K] Six.One Tour 90 to a low of 65 for the Wilson Hyper Hammer 6.3 Midplus (Traditional Bumper), which the reviewer found just a bit "sluggish and head-heavy." There is also a message board, general buying advice and a feature that lets you compare several tennis rackets by features and price. The one thing the site lacks is a way to see at a glance which models scored highest on the reviews.

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This website is the online arm of the pro shop at the San Diego Tennis & Racquet Club. It offers staff reviews, based on hands-on playing, of 34 models. Also included here are reprinted reviews from Tennis… Magazine for those models that don't get staff reviews. As with most retailers, nothing gets trashed, but the reviews do a good job of describing which type of player would find a specific tennis racket to be a good fit, and in some cases it will offer alternatives if you need more power or more control than that model offers. This website does not say which racket is best overall for, say, an intermediate baseliner, so consumers may need to spend some time looking at individual reviews unless they've already narrowed their search at another site.

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Smash magazine says it's "From the loins of Tennis Magazine" - in other words, it's Tennis Magazine's spawn, and it's written for younger players. On the Head Flexpoint Radical, for instance, it notes that… the Radical "has been around longer (13 years) than you've been playing tennis." James Martin names four rackets -- the Head Flexpoint Radical, the Prince O3 Tour MP, the Babolat Aeropro Drive and the Wilson N4 as the best. He never explains why they achieve this status, but the review is knowledgeable and critical.

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Guardian.co.uk is the online presence of the British newspaper The Guardian. In this review, Sean Ingle and Georgina Turner rank nine tennis rackets, broken into three price ranges. Although Prince rackets… get the highest scores in each price range, the ratings seem critical. The reviewers give no indication of how the rackets were tested, although it's obvious from the comments that there was hands-on use. Except in the least expensive category, the reviewers contrast their assessments with a "second opinion" from Tennis-Warehouse.com. The top selections have since been discontinued -- the Prince TTT Sierra Ti OS, Prince Tour NXG Mid Plus, Prince More Attack - but there's some useful information on other tennis rackets.

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About 80 tennis rackets receive some customer ratings at Amazon.com, but most are reviewed by only one or two people, and the contributor could be an expert or someone who has just picked up a tennis racket… for the first time. Nevertheless, it's always worth a visit after narrowing the search elsewhere. Amazon.com does offer the ability to sort the rackets by experience level - beginner, intermediate and advanced. Most rackets get perfect scores, so it's hard to glean much wisdom from Amazon.com reviews.

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This website is the online retail site of a Houston brick-and-mortar store, and it offers staff and consumer comments on some of the rackets it sells. We saw no negative assessments of any tennis rackets,… although there appears to be an honest evaluation of which type of player would match with a specific racket. This website also offers a message board and pretty extensive general buying advice, not just for rackets but for other tennis items.

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