Racquets Restrung per Player

So how many racquets does the average player restring during a major tournament?

How many do you re-string in a year??

The answer is at the US Open was 8!

But this is a fairly meaningless number as the range is huge – from 1 to 63. Only 11 players (5.1% of the total) actually restrung 8 racquets during the event and, in fact, almost as many – 10 (4.7% of the total) – only restrung 1 racquet! The way in which ‘averages’ are skewed by the extremes is illustrated by the fact that just 2 of the players (less than 1%) accounted for 110 (6.5%) of the 1,710 racquets restrung. Apart from Rafa Nadal (63) and Venus Williams (47) no other player restrung more than 30 racquets.

Quote - Rafa 63 re strings!!! and Venus 47!!!! I have been playing tennis for 38 years and I think I am on about 40 re strings!!!!!!!

We know that men restring 40% more racquets than women but how does this affect the number of racquets restrung (used) by an ‘average’ player of each gender? The average for men is 9.5 and for women it is 6.6. Excluding Rafa and Venus, the numbers are 9.0 and 6.2. Also remember that these numbers are for the whole tournament and not just one match with the ‘average’ number of racquets restrung for a man being about the same for the whole tournament as Rafa Nadal restrings for a single match. And the same goes for the average female player vs. Venus Williams.

The other factor that affects the number of racquets restrung by a player is, of course, the number of rounds that they play. 50% of players only play the first round and 50% of the remainder are eliminated in each successive round. A ‘better’ number might be obtained if we look at a single round. The first round would seem to be the most obvious as all of the players in our analysis took part. The average for men was 2.3 and for women it was 1.9. This is about half of the 40% difference calculated for all racquets strung during the event. But men restrung 2.7 racquets for pre-match practice compared to 1.6 by women - which perhaps illustrates another theory: that men practice more than women? The only other explanation is that men break a higher proportion of strings in practice than during matches. This is unlikely as there would appear to be no significant difference in the way that men practice vs women. The average number of restrings for practice and matches is 3.5 for men and 2.2 for women – with men stringing 60% more racquets than women.

Another factor that might affect the number of racquets restrung is the length of the match. We know that women have to play at least 2 sets and a maximum of 3 whereas men have to play at least 3 and a maximum of 5. This is a potential 50-66% difference but what is the actual difference in terms of games actually played?

In the first round of the event, men played 3,637 games and women played 2,287 – a difference of 60% and close to the center of the range that we expected.

In terms of the average number of games played by the players in our analysis, the numbers are approximately 36 for men and 22 for women - a difference of 63% - very close to the top of the possible range.

Which again illustrates the very significant difference in effort required from men vs. women in Grand Slam events!

Taken from ProTennis