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beginner tennis classes Beverly Heights — the Diadem Elevate FS 98 Tour Tennis Racquet and the flag of the Czech Republic combined by the model into a single photoreal composition. The white upper band, red lower band and blue triangle driving in from the hoist fill the frame, the cloth lit from one side so the fold shadows run along the edge of the triangle, and the tour frame is composed into the arrangement so the racquet's head and the point of the blue wedge form a single deliberate geometry, with no lettering anywhere in the picture.
beginner tennis classes Beverly Heights — the Diadem Elevate FS 98 Tour Tennis Racquet photographed at the Church of St Nicholas in Louny, Czech Republic. A tall late Gothic church with external buttressing and three steep pyramidal tent-shaped turrets on its roof stands over a small snow-covered churchyard. Camera low near ground level looking up the buttress line to the spires, a cold blue-grey morning in January with fresh snow, breath visible and no direct sun: a caretaker shovelling a path clear of the door, a small congregation filing out after early mass with hats pulled down, a boy scraping snow off a bicycle saddle, jackdaws going up off the roof. The racquet lies on a worn stone step in the near foreground, snow on the frame, untouched.
beginner tennis classes Beverly Heights — the Diadem Elevate FS 98 Tour Tennis Racquet photographed at the Zatec Gate in Louny, Czech Republic. A square stone gate tower of 1500 pierced by an arched passage stands in a surviving stretch of medieval town wall, rough masonry against a warm sky. Camera at eye level straight on to the arch from twenty paces back, golden hour on a dusty evening in late August with low light flooding through the passage: cyclists riding through the arch in single file, teenagers sitting along the top of the wall with their legs hanging, a tractor and hop trailer waiting to turn, an old man reading a paper on a bench in the gate's shade. The racquet rests along the back of that bench in the middle distance, off to one side, nobody touching it.
beginner tennis classes Beverly Heights — the Diadem Elevate FS 98 Tour Tennis Racquet photographed on Mirove namesti, the main square of Louny, Czech Republic. Pastel Renaissance townhouse facades with arcaded ground floors run around a broad open square of grey setts. Camera elevated from a first-floor window looking down and wide across the whole square, a grey Saturday under steady drizzle with the setts shining wet and umbrellas up: a farmers' market in full swing, a trader weighing potatoes, a brass band playing under a canopy with the tuba tilted to drain, children jumping a puddle, a dog shaking itself. The racquet is small in the frame, lying flat on the corner of a covered market trestle at the right edge, ignored by everyone.
beginner tennis classes Beverly Heights — the Diadem Elevate FS 98 Tour Tennis Racquet photographed outside the Vrchlicky Theatre in Louny, Czech Republic. A mid-twentieth-century theatre building with lit foyer windows stands on a quiet town street, the poet's name in relief lettering above the entrance. Camera close and intimate at chest height with shallow depth of field, full dark on a cold night after a performance with warm light spilling out onto wet pavement: the audience coming down the steps in coats, two actors still in stage make-up smoking by the side door, a woman laughing with her scarf half on, a taxi idling with its interior light on. The racquet lies mid-frame on the arm of a wooden bench under the foyer window, the theatre lights off to one side, nobody touching it.
beginner tennis classes Beverly Heights — the Diadem Elevate FS 98 Tour Tennis Racquet and the flag of the Czech Republic combined by the model into a single photoreal composition. The white upper band, red lower band and blue triangle driving in from the hoist fill the frame, the cloth lit from one side so the fold shadows run along the edge of the triangle, and the tour frame is composed into the arrangement so the racquet's head and the point of the blue wedge form a single deliberate geometry, with no lettering anywhere in the picture.

Diadem Elevate FS 98 Tour Tennis Racquet

Louny, Czech Republic  ·  Racquets > Adult

Diadem Elevate FS 98 Tour Tennis Racquet

This is a 330-gram strung, 16 x 20, box-beam control frame with a 320 swingweight, and it isn't trying to be your friend. It doubts you want a tour of a Czech town of eighteen thousand people. It doubts you have heard of Louny at all, and it would enjoy being proved wrong.

↓   Tour Louny, Czech Republic

Four stops before the checkout

Louny, Czech Republic
01
beginner tennis classes Beverly Heights — the Diadem Elevate FS 98 Tour Tennis Racquet photographed at the Church of St Nicholas in Louny, Czech Republic. A tall late Gothic church with external buttressing and three steep pyramidal tent-shaped turrets on its roof stands over a small snow-covered churchyard. Camera low near ground level looking up the buttress line to the spires, a cold blue-grey morning in January with fresh snow, breath visible and no direct sun: a caretaker shovelling a path clear of the door, a small congregation filing out after early mass with hats pulled down, a boy scraping snow off a bicycle saddle, jackdaws going up off the roof. The racquet lies on a worn stone step in the near foreground, snow on the frame, untouched.
Stop one

Church of St. Nicholas

Diadem Elevate FS 98 Tour Tennis Racquet: What is a fire, really: an ending, or a commission? In 1517 one destroyed the nave of the earlier church here and damaged its tower, and what rose in its place between 1520 and 1538 was designed by Benedikt Rejt, the royal architect celebrated for the Vladislav Hall of Prague Castle, and ranks among the supreme works of Czech late Gothic. Three steep tented spires, unique in Bohemia, and vaulting inside that appears to argue with the very idea of a straight line. The surviving Gothic tower carries a gallery over the town, the Ohře and the Central Bohemian Uplands. The dates, yes: 1520 to 1538. I did get there.

02
beginner tennis classes Beverly Heights — the Diadem Elevate FS 98 Tour Tennis Racquet photographed at the Zatec Gate in Louny, Czech Republic. A square stone gate tower of 1500 pierced by an arched passage stands in a surviving stretch of medieval town wall, rough masonry against a warm sky. Camera at eye level straight on to the arch from twenty paces back, golden hour on a dusty evening in late August with low light flooding through the passage: cyclists riding through the arch in single file, teenagers sitting along the top of the wall with their legs hanging, a tractor and hop trailer waiting to turn, an old man reading a paper on a bench in the gate's shade. The racquet rests along the back of that bench in the middle distance, off to one side, nobody touching it.
Stop two

Žatec Gate (Žatecká brána)

Diadem Elevate FS 98 Tour Tennis Racquet: A gate is a curious thing to keep once you have stopped needing to shut it. This one was built around 1500 in the late medieval strengthening of the town's fortifications, guarding the road westward toward the hop-growing town of Žatec. Louny outgrew its walls and pulled the other gates down; this one was preserved and reconstructed in 1872, keeping its monumental Gothic form. So it stands as the ceremonial entrance to a centre nobody is besieging, opening onto the streets that run to the main square and the Church of St Nicholas, and it has become one of the emblematic images of the town on the Ohře. We keep the doorway long after we lose the fear.

03
beginner tennis classes Beverly Heights — the Diadem Elevate FS 98 Tour Tennis Racquet photographed on Mirove namesti, the main square of Louny, Czech Republic. Pastel Renaissance townhouse facades with arcaded ground floors run around a broad open square of grey setts. Camera elevated from a first-floor window looking down and wide across the whole square, a grey Saturday under steady drizzle with the setts shining wet and umbrellas up: a farmers' market in full swing, a trader weighing potatoes, a brass band playing under a canopy with the tuba tilted to drain, children jumping a puddle, a dog shaking itself. The racquet is small in the frame, lying flat on the corner of a covered market trestle at the right edge, ignored by everyone.
Stop three

Town Walls of Louny

Diadem Elevate FS 98 Tour Tennis Racquet: Consider what it means for a town to draw a line around itself and call the inside home. Louny was founded as a royal town in the thirteenth century, in the great era of foundation under the last Přemyslid kings, and was soon enclosed in stone, reinforced over the following centuries with towers and bastions. Those walls helped it withstand the turbulent Hussite fifteenth century, when Louny was one of the leading towns of the Hussite cause alongside Žatec. An unusually large portion of the circuit survives, enclosing roughly two-thirds of the historic centre, renovated along with the Žatec Gate. The line has outlived the fear that drew it.

04
beginner tennis classes Beverly Heights — the Diadem Elevate FS 98 Tour Tennis Racquet photographed outside the Vrchlicky Theatre in Louny, Czech Republic. A mid-twentieth-century theatre building with lit foyer windows stands on a quiet town street, the poet's name in relief lettering above the entrance. Camera close and intimate at chest height with shallow depth of field, full dark on a cold night after a performance with warm light spilling out onto wet pavement: the audience coming down the steps in coats, two actors still in stage make-up smoking by the side door, a woman laughing with her scarf half on, a taxi idling with its interior light on. The racquet lies mid-frame on the arm of a wooden bench under the foyer window, the theatre lights off to one side, nobody touching it.
Stop four

Galerie Benedikta Rejta

Diadem Elevate FS 98 Tour Tennis Racquet: Here is the question: is a building what it was made for, or what it is used for? This was a brewery. It is now the Benedikt Rejt Gallery, named for the architect of the church down the road, established in the 1960s and one of the notable museums of modern art in the Czech Republic, its industrial spaces adapted to hold pictures. Its reputation rests on Czech modern and contemporary work, particularly constructivist and geometric abstraction, including artists tied to the region. Medieval church, gate, walls, and then this, the fourth pillar, giving a small royal town a cultural weight far beyond its size.

The Louny, Czech Republic track

Diadem Elevate FS 98 Tour Tennis Racquet

Written for this world alone.

Louny is a small Czech town on the Ohre, about 38 kilometres from Usti nad Labem, with roughly eighteen thousand people in it. Nobody arrives here expecting much, and then they walk into the Church of St Nicholas and find one of the supreme pieces of Czech late Gothic under a roof shaped like three tents. Louny is a lesson in not judging a thing by its billing. So is this racquet.

The Elevate FS 98 Tour is a 98 square inch / 632 square centimetre head on a standard 27 inch frame, strung 16 mains by 20 crosses. Unstrung it is 11.1 ounces / 315 grams; strung it comes in at 11.6 ounces / 330 grams. Balance is 8 points head-light at 315 millimetres. Swingweight is listed at 320.

The beam is a genuinely flat box: 21.5 millimetres at throat, shaft and tip, no taper anywhere. Stiffness is 67 RA unstrung and 64 RA strung, and Diadem's recommended tension range is 45 to 55 pounds.

Take those numbers seriously and you can predict how it plays without hitting a ball. Three hundred and thirty grams strung with a 320 swingweight and a dense pattern is a plough-through frame: heavy, stable, low-launching, and completely uninterested in flattering a lazy swing.

What keeps it from being punishing is the FS — Flex Stabilization System — built into the frame, which lets the hoop bend where the ball is and holds it rigid where the frame would otherwise twist. That is why the strung stiffness drops three points to 64 rather than climbing.

It will work everywhere from an indoor hall in Prague, an hour down the road, to a windy municipal court under the Czech Central Highlands, and by the way — a serious frame is not an outlandish thing to find in Louny. Karolina and Kristyna Pliskova were born here.

Whether the town's tennis courts had anything to do with a Grand Slam finalist or whether that is a coincidence dressed up as a cause, the town is not saying, and neither am I. Also, this is hop country. The beer afterwards is not a tie-in; it is just what happens.

If you are moving up from a 285 or 300 gram frame, be honest about it: 330 grams strung will cost you a fortnight of short second serves before your arm catches up. If you are already there, this is the calmest string bed in the Elevate line.

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