You may not have known that buying a tennis racket, such a seemingly simple object, could be so complicated, but believe me, it is.

Buying a tennis racket is never an easy feat. The plethora of options along with the ability to demo frames ad nauseum can confuse even the most certain of buyers. You play with a racket, fall in love with it, then all of the sudden, something else comes out with “better dampening and feel” and “more spin” and you go straight down the rabbit hole once again.

Buying a tennis racket FOR someone, at least for the type of player who cares about their gear, can be the biggest challenge on planet earth, no hyperbole whatsoever.

Us tennis players, we are extremely picky.

The racket is more or less an extension of our arm, and with the mental aspect of tennis being what it is, one misplaced forehand, and a racket can be banished to proverbial Narnia.

Because of this, it is important not to take the purchase of a racket as a present lightly; it is an extremely serious matter.

But we, at Rackets & Runners are here to help. With a few tips, you can still purchase a racket with the same shock impact of any normal gift, but without running the risk that that frame will end up smashed to pieces the very first game. 

There are many aspects of a tennis racket that will come in to play when finding the best fit, and very few of those aspects are easily solvable with normal, everyday gift-finding tricks.

While finding grip size and weight may be simple enough, the intricacies of head size, power and the ever elusive “feel” remain nigh on impossible to get right (at least all together).

Because of this, the only racket you will be walking out of the store with when purchasing a racket as a present, will be a glorified, life-sized coupon.

We will guide you every step of the way, and ask you the most important questions to get you as close as possible to the perfect racket, but we will both also know that that racket is definitely coming back.

Is it mathematically possible that that racket be the perfect racket? Yes. Then how can I be so sure that it is coming back?

Because the one thing we will not be doing with the racket, is stringing it.

While we may hit the jackpot with the frame, we do not want to take the risk of you losing your string credit should it not be the perfect fit. So we will see you, the racket, and its new owner post-Christmas, for stringing or whatever direction we chose to go in.

So, the big day comes and the racket is unwrapped.

We will have shown you a few tricks to see if the grip size is accurate, and if it is, some beginner tennis players, who may not have developed a precise preference, may be perfectly happy with the frame. In that case, we will see you very shortly to string up your racket with something that hopefully falls within our $35 credit.

If the player has more typical tennis player tendencies and the frame is not exactly to their liking, the racket turns into a coupon.

The two of you are more than welcome to come to the store, and exchange the racket for a different one and string it up with that players’ string of choice. (It is important to add that some strings don’t fall into our $35 string credit).

However, if this is still not enough, and the player wants to delve even deeper into trialing rackets to land on the perfect one, we are more than happy to return the racket, and send the player on their demo journey (with the hope that they ultimately find their perfect racket).

Only once the player is perfectly satisfied with their new racket and strings, will we consider ourselves satisfied with a job well done.

So while giving a tennis racket racket might not fall into a simple gift category, with a few simple gift-buying tips, the tennis player in your life should ultimately walk away very happy. We at Rackets & Runners want you to know we will be with you every step of the way.

Happy gifting giving!