The Bottom Line
A solid, accessible, highly readable primer on the characteristics of racquets, strings, and balls that govern how they interact with one another and affect your on-court performance.
Pros
- Fairly concise
- Accessible to non-technical readers
- Good illustrations
- Scientific approach
- Engaging writing
Cons
- A few passages are misleading if one hasn't read the whole chapter.
- Readers looking for quick summaries will find fewer than they might wish.
Description
- Paperback
- 152 pages
- Chapter 1: Racquets: power, control, weight, stiffness, and customization
- Chapter 2: Strings: stiffness, tension, dwell time, and performance
- Chapter 3: Balls and Bounce: ball bounce off the court and off the strings
- Chapter 4: Spin and Trajectory: spin generation, spin serves, and trajectory
- No index
Guide Review - Book: Technical Tennis
Technical Tennis, by Rod Cross and Crawford Lindsey, offers a quick, but substantive introduction to how racquets, strings, and balls function and interact. The book does a great job of dispelling popular myths, and it offers insightful explanations of how players can easily misinterpret apparent cause-and-effect. For example, players might believe that stiffer string generates more spin because they have noticed that they hit with more spin when they use stiffer strings. Cross and Lindsey cite lab results that show that, all other factors being equal, stiffer strings don't generate more spin. Instead, they explain, what is probably happening is that players must swing faster with stiffer strings to get the same power, and a faster swing generates faster ball rotation. Technical Tennis is full of interesting cause-and-effect cases like this.For a book solidly based on physics, Technical Tennis uses surprisingly few formulas, and they're usually set aside in special, in-depth boxes that less technically inclined readers can easily skip. Also somewhat scarce are quick summaries of what or how to choose racquets and strings. Part of the reason is probably that many choices are too complex to boil down, and where the book does try, it sometimes oversimplifies a complicated issue like the best frame stiffness for arm safety. To get a full and accurate understanding, you should read entire chapters. In a 152-page, nicely written book, that shouldn't be difficult.
