How to Choose the BEST 98 for Your Game

The 98 square inch racquet market is the most competitive racquet segment in tennis. There are honestly a ton of amazing choices but it can be hard to orient yourself in the racquet jungle. Right off the bat, I can tell you my personal favourite 98, it’s the 18x20 Solinco Whiteout and its my racquet of choice. The problem is, just because it’s MY favourite, doesn’t mean it will be right for you, not to mention it’s really hard to get outside the US right now. Here, we are going to be ranking some of the most popular 98 square inch racquets you can buy today on sliding scales by a variety of criteria, to help you find your next racquet.

Important Notes

Note that I haven’t tried every single 98 square inch racquet on the market, so if your favourite Prince or Volkl isn’t on this list, it’s because I just haven’t tried it yet. I am also only going to talk about racquets that I have multiple hours of hitting experience with. For example, I do like the Dunlop CX200, but I’ve only hit with it for about 20 minutes.

This means we are only going to be talking about the 11 racquets that I think are the most mainstream and important 98 square inch options for the average player. Some of these racquets are also offered in a variety of weight options, so for this test we will be going with whatever option is closest to 305g. Further, some of the racquets are available in different lengths. For this video, we will be sticking to standard length, 27 inch racquets.

Also, this article, much like every tennis racquet review video or article, can never be fully objective, unbiased or that empirical.  Everyday we step on court is a new day. Weather conditions affect your strings and how the balls bounce. Our hitting partners will be playing a little differently and quality control means that two racquets don’t always leave the factory with the same specs. Things like weight, balance and stiffness can vary greatly depending on the racquet.

So if you disagree with something, please leave a comment so that the people reading can pull from more data points than just my experience with these racquets.

Feel

First, let's start with feel. I think you can really narrow things down by deciding what kind of feel you want, and here, we can break feel up into two categories, first the level of ball feedback you get and second, the length of the dwell time, or the level of ball pocketing offered by the stringbed.

Ball feedback is typically determined by how much dampening tech is utilized in the racquet. This feedback is vibration which can be felt both in the hand and heard as sound. More dampening tech usually means a more muted feel. Some may perceive this as a more solid feel while others may perceive this as a more disconnected experience.

Dwell time refers to how long the ball is held on the stringbed during your shot. Typically, softer racquets with more open string patterns, heavier weights and higher swingweights have longer dwell times. Usually, longer dwell times are associated with “good ball pocketing” and A more “old school” feel. Shorter dwell times often feel more modern and are sometimes referred to as “point and shoot” by the legendary Chris Edwards.

Stability

When it comes to stability, the racquet gets pushed back in two different ways. You’ve probably felt your racquet twist in your hand when you hit the ball off-centre. The better a racquet is to resist that twisting, the greater the torsional stability. Typically racquets with stiffer layups, thicker beams and more weight at 3 and 9 are more torsionally stable.

What I’m calling “lateral stability” would be felt most on returns or volleys. If you’ve ever felt your racquet get knocked straight back from a hard shot, usually because you contact the ball outside the sweetspot, or hit it late, mostly towards the tip of the fame. Racquets with higher recoil weights, swingweights, static weights and stiffnesses usually have better lateral stability. I find this to be more important as you start experiencing faster ball speeds, and less important for beginners and lower level intermediate players.

Power

To be honest, I often struggle with definitions of “power.” Quite often, power is defined as some combination of depth, ball speed and the general “heaviness,” or even just, how much help the racquet gives you. To me, this is too vague so we are going to split power up and talk about it in two ways.

One is attacking power. This is for when you are in control of the point and you are trying to hurt your opponent with pace. To me, swingweight is king when it comes to attacking power, but stiffer racquets with thicker beams also transfer energy more efficiently, allowing you to hit harder, faster shots that will hurt your opponent with ball speed and spin.

The other way I want to talk about power is forgiveness, this is more about how much the racquet helps you hit an effective ball when you are out of position. I often refer to this as forgiveness outside the sweet spot. Racquets that are more forgiving are often more stable and have less of a playability drop off outside the sweetspot. Sometimes this is simply defined as “having a large sweetspot.” This usually means there is more “hitting weight” or weight placed around the hoop of the racquet, but I typically find that more open string patterns towards the edge of the stringbed and thicker beams also help with general forgiveness.

More Notes

Annoyingly, for me who has to make this list, but nicely for you, the consumer, some of the racquets on this list have multiple options for string patterns. For the previous categories, I don’t think the string pattern makes a sufficiently significant difference in the rankings to bother cluttering the list, but for control, I think string pattern is absolutely critical. The problem is I don’t want to make all these icons tiny, so we will have my preferred string pattern in a given racquet as big and then the one I don’t like will be small because I’m petty.

Control

When I judge control, I think about it in two different ways, and generally, it's more about how the racquet’s stringbed performs.

Typically, lower launch angles are associated with better control because it’s harder to access depth and miss long. You’ll often have to swing harder or more vertically to get the same kind of net clearance and depth you might find with a lower launch angle racquet. Usually, racquets with less open string spacing and lower stiffnesses have lower launch angles. Note that I said less open string spacing, not less open patterns. Some 16x19s are tighter than some 18x20s because you can drill the patterns differently.

When it comes to directional control, usually tighter string spacing is better, however it’s also about matching the pattern to the playability drop off. For example, the 16x19 in the EZONE is tight in the middle and more open towards the edges to account for less forgiveness outside the sweetspot when compared to the Pure Aero 98, which has more forgiveness off centre and more even spacing throughout the head.

I also find that racquets with more consistent flexes have better directional control. Usually that means a medium to high flex. Some racquets, like the Wilson Clash or the Shift flex differently depending on what kind of shot you hit. I find that this leads to an inconsistent response and poor directional control.

Spin

There are two types of spin that players hit with, however, for some reason, “spin racquets” seem to be geared exclusively for topspin. With both types of spin, racquet head speed and maneuverability is key, however, I think they draw on other playing attributes for success. I find that the best topspin racquets often have more power, whereas the best slice racquets need strong directional control.

I personally find the effect of string pattern in the same frames to have surprisingly insignificant impact, however, I will include the additional string patterns for this section mainly due to fear of what the comments section will look like.

I also think it's very important to say that you can hit flat and topspin with all of these racquets and I don’t think the Top Spin category should be prioritized as highly for most players. Slices are often more important for certain players and the racquet can have a more significant impact with the control needed to high a knifing slice. However, for top spin, any racquet must be produce to respond to strong topspin technique, particularly the modern 98 square inch racquet category, as these racquets are designed with the modern topspin game in mind.

Speed

Ok this one is simple. It's basically just maneuverability.

This is important for generating fast swing speeds which will help you access power and spin, but can also be helpful when getting into position for service returns and volleys.

Overall

Last up is overall recommendations. First are the racquets that I find myself recommending most in the racquet consultations I offer through my website, as well as in the comments sections, since I always try to reply to your questions down there. I think this is the closest I’ll ever get to some sort of objective, overall best list, however, it's still incredibly subjective and I definitely expect people to disagree with it.

Finally, we have my personal list. These are the racquets I’d choose for myself in order of “I’d most want to use this as my racquet of choice to least.” It’s illegal to disagree with this list.