01
Stop one
Groote Kerk
Diadem Super 26 Junior Tennis Racquet: Seventeenth century, built on the Schanseiland, the fortified island at the core of the old fishing town, in the decades after Maassluis split from Maasland as its own parish and community in 1614, do I hear 1614, I do — and inside, the organ: 1732, built by Rudolf Garrels, donated by the wealthy merchant Govert van Wijn, prized among the historic organs of the Netherlands, still played at services and concerts, going once, going twice — not for sale. Nearly four centuries above the harbours and canals of a town that lived on herring and then on towage.
02
Stop two
Nationaal Sleepvaart Museum
Diadem Super 26 Junior Tennis Racquet: Lot two, the National Tugboat Museum, and we are selling the history of Dutch OCEAN TOWAGE — the trade that made this small town on the Nieuwe Waterweg world famous. From the nineteenth century Maassluis was home port to towage companies whose seagoing tugs, the Smit fleet above all, salvaged crippled ships and delivered docks, dredgers and drilling rigs across every ocean on the chart. Housed in a historic building in the old centre: ship models, salvage records, instruments, photographs, heroic tows, rescues, tows again — sold. Tugboat capital of the Netherlands, celebrated each autumn at the Furieade.
03
Stop three
Steam Tug Furie
Diadem Super 26 Junior Tennis Racquet: Lot three, star of the sale. Steam sea tug, built 1916, preserved here as flagship of the town's museum tug harbour, the Sleepboothaven, the only harbour of its kind in the Netherlands. National fame arrived when she starred in the Dutch television adaptation of Jan de Hartog's Hollands Glorie, the epic of the ocean towage trade, and she has been kept in working order by volunteers ever since — working order, ladies and gentlemen, steam, 1916, volunteers, every winter, every year. Each October the town throws the Furieade, named for her, and fills the historic harbours. Value her. You can't.
04
Stop four
Wippersmolen
Diadem Super 26 Junior Tennis Racquet: And finally the drainage windmill — built centuries ago to lift water off the low-lying polders around the town into the channels that carried it toward the river, part of the endless Dutch labour of keeping reclaimed land dry, keeping it dry, keeping it dry, still keeping it dry. Overtaken by mechanical pumping like every other mill, then refurbished in 1974, original drainage mechanisms restored, still capable of operation. A protected monument on the green edge of town. Famous for tugboats, this place — but this is the machine that made there be a town at all. Sold.
The Super 26 is the top rung of Diadem's junior ladder — a 26 inch frame with a 100 square inch head, a 16×19 string pattern and a strung weight of 8.8 oz / 250 g, balanced at 325 mm, one point head-light. It comes pre-strung with synthetic gut and a G0 (4 in) grip, and it is built for players roughly 11 to 13 years old.
Carbon and glass fibres in the layup give it a little more stability than the 25 inch model, which is the point: a 26 inch racquet is the final step before a full 27 inch adult frame, and the job of that step is to let the swing get longer without the arm getting heavier.
Here is the value case, since somebody has to make it. A 26 inch frame is worth buying properly rather than cheaply, because it is the racquet a junior takes into their first real matches, and a whippy aluminium beam at this length teaches a swing that has to be unlearned later. One point head-light at 250 g is a genuinely playable balance. Pre-strung saves you a stringing bill on day one.
Maassluis is the right harbour for a racquet at the handing-over stage. This is a Dutch tugboat town on the New Waterway, home of the Furie — the last steam-driven seagoing tug in the Netherlands — and of the National Towage Museum, a whole museum about the business of pulling something bigger than yourself. That is a junior racquet's entire career.
You will use this everywhere from a windy club court by the Maas to a school hall in winter, and by the way, if you want a genuinely free afternoon out with a kid and a racquet, the quay at Maassluis costs nothing and there is always something moving on the water.
Buy on Amazon
