If you haven’t noticed tennis is a highly traditional. Same old school scoring, same etiquette, same Wimbledon whites. And the same 27″ racket for virtually everyone! Maybe it’s time to change that?
Why 27″ ?
They say because net height 36″ is a racket lengthwise plus the head sideways. Anyway 27inch might be right for you, but it might be bad. My view is that the length should reflect your height…although there is a case for extra reach (extra long) if you have a short reach.
● Tennis regulations: maximum length for a tennis racket is 29 inches (73.7 cm), maximum width is 12.5 inches (31.7 cm).
● Badminton: the maximum length 27.77 inches (70.5 cm); maximum width is 9 inches (23 cm)
● Squash: maximum length is 27 inches (68.6 cm), and the maximum width is 8.5 inches (21.6 cm)
● Racquetball: maximum length 22 inches (55.9 cm), and the maximum width is 12 inches (30.5 cm).
Racket Length by Age
If you look up racket length, you find a chart by age, not height, but I added height back in here and added 0.5″ increments.
However you have to add an age correction such that juniors are encouraged to move up to a larger size sooner. So…
Personalized Biometric Length
However there is another way to work out tennis racket size, and that is simply the gap between the fingers and the floor when standing straight with arms down and fingers extended.
This “reach-to-the-floor” gap scales with height, once you take off the head size (which is pretty static).
So if you take your height, minus 25cm (or 10inch) for your head size then multiply by 0.46 (46%) you should have a biometric based tennis racket size that’s much better than the traditional 27″ no matter what.
