The rackets the pros use are not exactly the same you use – Seb Proisy

In this interview with The French Insider, Seb Proisy talked to Jenny Drummond about the pros rackets

“A lot of pros, they need something that’s a little bit heavier,” Proisy explained. “If they were to just walk into a store and pick one of these stock rackets, it just wouldn’t cut it for them. They need to have all of this customization done on the racket, which goes from adding led tape to the head of the racket; sometimes adding silicon or something inside the handle to make it denser and make it heavier; sometimes remodeling the grip altogether. So there are a whole bunch of things done to make it exactly fitting for to player.”

“A lot of brands are always in between chairs”

While the pros care most about the racket feeling good, brands want their rackets to look good. Those companies generally update their models faster than the pros want change their rackets, which creates an interesting dynamic.

“Brands our under a lot of pressure to update their models every two or three years,” Proisy continued. “But players, on the other hand, when they have a good feel on a racket they are pretty reluctant to change and to move to something different. So what’s happens is, say a player wants to keep his old racket, what the brand will do is they will let him keep his old racket and they will just paint it to just look like the newer model, so they can say that they are endorsing the newer model.

“It’s tough. A lot of brands are always in between chairs. They’re thinking, ‘okay, we want the player to still feel good with the racket.’ But at the same time they want to appeal to the bigger audience, and they want to say, ‘okay, we have newer things going into that model.'”

No matter what the pros are playing with, you probably aren’t going to find any of their exact rackets on the open market. Proisy says the best way to go about mimicking the best players in the world is customizing your own racket in way that feels comfortable in your hand while also closely following the ways in which the pros doctor their own rackets.

In other words, it’s not easy to play like the pros — in more ways than one!