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Themed Cardio Tennis Clinics in the Fort Lauderdale Area

beginner tennis classes Colee Hammock — the Diadem Axis Team 16x19 Tennis Racquet and the flag of India combined by the model into a single photoreal composition. The horizontal saffron, white and green tricolour fills the frame with the navy blue twenty-four-spoked Ashoka Chakra centred on the white band, the cloth lit from one side so the folds carry light across the wheel, and the black and orange frame is composed into the arrangement so the open string bed and the spoked wheel read as one design, with no lettering anywhere in the picture.
beginner tennis classes Colee Hammock — the Diadem Axis Team 16x19 Tennis Racquet photographed at Shri Siddheshwar Temple in Solapur, India. The temple stands on its island in the middle of Siddheshwar Lake, reached by a causeway, ranks of shivalingams set out in the courtyard and the fort wall across the water behind. Camera low and close on the wet causeway steps looking toward the shrine, first light on a cool December morning with mist still lying on the lake and pink sun on the stone: devotees crouched at the water's edge throwing handfuls of feed to the fish, a priest ringing the bell at the doorway, a queue of barefoot pilgrims coming along the causeway, a woman setting down a brass pot. The racquet lies flat on a worn stone step in the near foreground, untouched.
beginner tennis classes Colee Hammock — the Diadem Axis Team 16x19 Tennis Racquet photographed inside Bhuikot Fort in Solapur, India. Long stone curtain walls and round bastions enclose flat open ground on the lake bank, a ruined Shiva shrine and a pillared mosque with a carved ceiling standing among the grass. Camera at eye level in the middle distance across the fort maidan, hard bright afternoon sun in April with short black shadows and dust hanging: a full cricket match in progress on the beaten earth, a boy mid-delivery with his arm coming over, fielders scattered to the wall, families sitting in the shade of a bastion, a vendor pushing a barrow of sliced cucumber. The racquet rests on a low fallen block of the wall off to the left, ignored by everybody.
beginner tennis classes Colee Hammock — the Diadem Axis Team 16x19 Tennis Racquet photographed at Hutatma Chowk in Solapur, India. Statues of four men stand on a raised garlanded memorial platform at a busy city-centre junction, shopfronts and hoardings and circling traffic around them. Camera close and intimate at chest height with shallow depth of field, dusk on 12 January with the street lights just on and the sky still deep blue: students laying a wreath at the base while one reads from a card, a flower seller threading marigolds at speed, headlights streaking behind, a man on a scooter slowing to fold his hands. The racquet sits mid-frame on the flat top of a low kerbside bollard, the memorial off centre behind it, nobody touching it.
beginner tennis classes Colee Hammock — the Diadem Axis Team 16x19 Tennis Racquet photographed at the Great Indian Bustard Sanctuary near Nannaj, 22 kilometres from Solapur, India. Open dry grassland runs flat to the horizon with scattered thorn scrub and a timber observation tower on the skyline. Camera elevated on the tower platform, wide, with the racquet small in frame, golden hour on a clear evening in October with the grass lit copper and long shadows: forest guards glassing the plain with binoculars, one pointing, a shepherd walking a flock of black goats along a track, a bullock cart on the far bund throwing dust, a lone great Indian bustard head-up in the grass. The racquet rests on the tower's timber parapet at the right edge, untouched.
beginner tennis classes Colee Hammock — the Diadem Axis Team 16x19 Tennis Racquet and the flag of India combined by the model into a single photoreal composition. The horizontal saffron, white and green tricolour fills the frame with the navy blue twenty-four-spoked Ashoka Chakra centred on the white band, the cloth lit from one side so the folds carry light across the wheel, and the black and orange frame is composed into the arrangement so the open string bed and the spoked wheel read as one design, with no lettering anywhere in the picture.

Diadem Axis Team 16×19 Tennis Racquet

Solapur, India  ·  Racquets > Adult

Diadem Axis Team 16×19 Tennis Racquet

This is a 280-gram, 100-in², open-pattern all-rounder with a genuinely soft 64 RA beam — quick to swing, kind to a late ball. In my day you bought a racquet and went straight to the court, but this one insists on showing you round Solapur first, and honestly, at my age, the walk is the good part.

↓   Tour Solapur, India

Four stops before the checkout

Solapur, India
01
beginner tennis classes Colee Hammock — the Diadem Axis Team 16x19 Tennis Racquet photographed at Shri Siddheshwar Temple in Solapur, India. The temple stands on its island in the middle of Siddheshwar Lake, reached by a causeway, ranks of shivalingams set out in the courtyard and the fort wall across the water behind. Camera low and close on the wet causeway steps looking toward the shrine, first light on a cool December morning with mist still lying on the lake and pink sun on the stone: devotees crouched at the water's edge throwing handfuls of feed to the fish, a priest ringing the bell at the doorway, a queue of barefoot pilgrims coming along the causeway, a woman setting down a brass pot. The racquet lies flat on a worn stone step in the near foreground, untouched.
Stop one

Solapur Bhuikot Fort (Solapur Bhuikot Killa)

Diadem Axis Team 16×19 Tennis Racquet: A double line of fortification, and I have never felt more understood. This is a land fort rather than a hill fort, which is exactly what its name records, so with no mountain to lean on they simply built the walls twice. Fourteenth century, under the Bahmani sultans: a main entrance called Hatti Darwaja, a north gate, a Mahakali gate, and inside a Shani temple, a ruined Shiva temple, a Mahakaleshwar temple, a mosque with a carved ceiling and pillars, an octagonal well and a small pond. Water and provisions, on site, always. It passed to the Adil Shahi and Nizam Shahi sultanates, the Mughals, the Nizam of Hyderabad and the Marathas; Bajirao II and Chhatrapati Pratap Singh Bhosale stayed here in 1818. Now ruined, maintained by the Archaeological Survey of India.

02
beginner tennis classes Colee Hammock — the Diadem Axis Team 16x19 Tennis Racquet photographed inside Bhuikot Fort in Solapur, India. Long stone curtain walls and round bastions enclose flat open ground on the lake bank, a ruined Shiva shrine and a pillared mosque with a carved ceiling standing among the grass. Camera at eye level in the middle distance across the fort maidan, hard bright afternoon sun in April with short black shadows and dust hanging: a full cricket match in progress on the beaten earth, a boy mid-delivery with his arm coming over, fielders scattered to the wall, families sitting in the shade of a bastion, a vendor pushing a barrow of sliced cucumber. The racquet rests on a low fallen block of the wall off to the left, ignored by everybody.
Stop two

Shri Siddheshwar Temple

Diadem Axis Team 16×19 Tennis Racquet: Sixty-eight Shiva lingams standing in one courtyard, which is sixty-seven more than strictly necessary, and I mean that as the highest praise I am capable of. They are said to have been installed by Shri Siddharameshwar, a disciple of Shri Mallikarjuna of Srisailam, who laid the temple's foundation; its origins go back to the twelfth century. Siddheshwar is the presiding deity of Solapur city, and the Gadda Yatra fair held here at Makar Sankranti is the town's principal annual gathering, which means the entire city in one place, which means water, shade and patience. Bring all three. Bring spares of all three. Somebody always forgets.

03
beginner tennis classes Colee Hammock — the Diadem Axis Team 16x19 Tennis Racquet photographed at Hutatma Chowk in Solapur, India. Statues of four men stand on a raised garlanded memorial platform at a busy city-centre junction, shopfronts and hoardings and circling traffic around them. Camera close and intimate at chest height with shallow depth of field, dusk on 12 January with the street lights just on and the sky still deep blue: students laying a wreath at the base while one reads from a card, a flower seller threading marigolds at speed, headlights streaking behind, a man on a scooter slowing to fold his hands. The racquet sits mid-frame on the flat top of a low kerbside bollard, the memorial off centre behind it, nobody touching it.
Stop three

Solapur Municipal Corporation Building (Indra Bhuvan)

Diadem Axis Team 16×19 Tennis Racquet: Modest building, enormous morning. It was raised in 1930 by Rao Saheb Mallappa Warad and became the seat of Solapur's municipal government, and then on 6 April 1930 the Indian national flag was hoisted here, the first municipal building in the country on which it was flown. The first. Which means somebody had that flag ready, folded, waiting, and knew exactly which morning to bring it out, and that is the standard of preparation I have organised my entire life around. Everything else in town that day was ordinary. This was not.

04
beginner tennis classes Colee Hammock — the Diadem Axis Team 16x19 Tennis Racquet photographed at the Great Indian Bustard Sanctuary near Nannaj, 22 kilometres from Solapur, India. Open dry grassland runs flat to the horizon with scattered thorn scrub and a timber observation tower on the skyline. Camera elevated on the tower platform, wide, with the racquet small in frame, golden hour on a clear evening in October with the grass lit copper and long shadows: forest guards glassing the plain with binoculars, one pointing, a shepherd walking a flock of black goats along a track, a bullock cart on the far bund throwing dust, a lone great Indian bustard head-up in the grass. The racquet rests on the tower's timber parapet at the right edge, untouched.
Stop four

Solapur Railway Station

Diadem Axis Team 16×19 Tennis Racquet: The junction is the reason for everything else, so let us start there. Solapur is a division headquarters and one of the main junctions on the trunk route linking south India with western and north-western India, and the arrival of the railway is what turned it into a cotton-mill town in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Cotton in, cloth out, supply lines in both directions. The station remains the point around which the modern city is organised, with the Bhuikot Fort about two kilometres away. Two kilometres in this heat, so take water for the walk. I have some. I have rather a lot.

The Solapur, India track

Diadem Axis Team 16×19 Tennis Racquet

Written for this world alone.

Solapur has been weaving for a living for a very long time. The city's chaddars — cotton bed sheets, once handloom and now largely jacquard-woven — are so distinctive that the Government of India granted them Geographical Indication status in 2005, and the towel trade sits right beside them.

A city that has spent a century judging a cloth by its tension and its consistency is the right place to introduce a frame whose whole argument is about the string bed.

The Axis Team is the accessible member of Diadem's Axis line. Head size 100 square inches. Unstrung weight 9.9 ounces / 280 grams. Balance 4 points head-light at 330 millimetres. Length 27 inches. String pattern 16 mains by 19 crosses. Beam 23 / 26 / 23 millimetres. Stiffness 64 RA. Grips run 4 inches (L0), 4 1/8 (L1), 4 1/4 (L2) and 4 3/8 (L3).

Elina Svitolina, a 19-time WTA champion and Olympic bronze medallist, plays out of this line.

Two hundred and eighty grams with a 100 square inch head and an open 16 x 19 pattern is the specification you give somebody who has to swing fast and cannot afford to be late.

The wider beam through the throat adds free depth so you are not manufacturing all your own pace; the open pattern lets the strings bite and move, so the ball comes off with shape rather than a flat trajectory; and 64 RA is genuinely soft for a frame this light.

The technology is the same package as the heavier Axis frames, not a stripped-down version: the Air Foil frame shape cuts drag through the swing, the Precision + Strike Zone lifts the tightest section of the string bed higher up the hoop where a modern player actually meets the ball, FS3 runs three carbon fibre ribs with HMT carbon and high-density foam to hold the frame steady on off-centre hits, and Kraibon, an elastomer out of motorsport and aerospace, takes the sting out of the ones you catch late.

You will use it everywhere from a dusty club court behind the Bhuikot fort walls to a proper hard court in Pune, and by the way, the thing to know about Solapur is that its most famous fabric earns its reputation on durability. Same test as a racquet. Anybody can make something that feels lovely for a week.

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