In 1997 Brazilian tennis player Gustavo “Guga” Kuerten changed the tennis world forever. He dominated the French Open ranked 66th in the world using a new type of tennis string never seen before. It was an experimental string made by a Belgian medical company called, Luxilon. But what was more impressive was the material it was made out of, polyester. Before then, natural gut was the only kind of string for nearly 100 years and the introduction of nylon strings in the 1960s was a 30 year old material. Nylons didn’t really provide any advantages over natural gut but lowered the cost of entry for tennis to the general public.
As we have entered the new millenium, polyester tennis strings are virtually an industry standard in tennis. However, you’ll never see it in the racquets they sell at Walmart for a good reason. It’s a high performance string and is very demanding. Something that a professional tennis player who has spent their entire childhood sharpening their skills can truly utilize. Many of my customers, who have been playing since they were kids, grew up using polyesters and are quite skilled at maximizing its qualities.
Many of you probably had your high school coach string up polyester in the mains and syn gut (nylon) in the crosses. I absolutely hate that combination, btw (feel free to ask my why).
So to keep things familiar for those millennials, I’ve created a hybrid that still uses an early gen polyester that actually performs really well. These early years of polyesters were the biggest glut of horrible polyester strings that ever hit the market. It’s kind of my biggest gripe about the lack of care these companies put into releasing a product that didn’t completely suck. But they did hit the target with just 2 of them that I’ve tried. They’ve proven to perform very well for the competitive recreational player and don’t come with all of the ARM blasting results you hear about from many other polyester strings.
But as age comes for us all and we can’t cross our polyester mains with syn gut (YUCK) forever. Your arms need more comfort so my solution is to put PEEK in the crosses to really mellow out the harshness of polyester.
- uses 16L early gen shaped polyesters
- 16L is thin enough to give you lots of bite on the ball but thick enough for decent string life
- I don’t recommend this hybrid if if you don’t normally break strings within 6 months to a year
- fortunately many millennials understand polyester strings won’t last forever
- string it at the mid to low end of the tension range
