FOLLOW US

Facebook Instagram Youtube X-twitter

Burn, Laugh and Learn

BOOK A CLINIC

THE TENNIS TACTICIAN, LLC

Themed Cardio Tennis Clinics in the Fort Lauderdale Area

best cardiovascular tennis clinic Fort Lauderdale — a wide photograph of Mekele, Ethiopia showing the city as it really is, with no product in frame: the low stone-and-render city spread across the Tigray highlands at 2,254 metres in hard clear late-afternoon light, flat roofs and dust-coloured streets running out to bare stony hills, the tall pale Tigray Martyrs Memorial standing over the Adi-Haki edge of town, minibuses and three-wheelers filling a junction, women carrying yellow water containers along a verge, and a haze of woodsmoke lying over the roofs as the cooking hour starts.
best cardiovascular tennis clinic Fort Lauderdale — the Diadem Evolution 16g Tennis String Reel photographed in the walled compound of the Emperor Yohannes IV Palace Museum in Mekele, Ethiopia. A squat two-storey stone palace with arched windows and a flat crenellated roofline, plainer and more fortress-like than a European palace, the low Tigray hills past the compound wall. Bright dry mid-morning in January, hard shadow, dust in the light: a school group being walked in through the gate two at a time, a museum guide unlocking an inner door, an elderly caretaker sweeping the compound with a bundle of twigs, three students sitting on the step copying notes. The reel of string sits low in the near foreground on a worn stone step, untouched and unnoticed by all of them.
best cardiovascular tennis clinic Fort Lauderdale — the Diadem Evolution 16g Tennis String Reel photographed at the Tigray Martyrs Memorial Monument in the Adi-Haki district of Mekele, Ethiopia. A pale concrete monument 51 metres tall standing alone on open ground, its base ringed with large relief sculpture of peasants and fighters, the city low and flat behind it. Wide elevated view at dusk in early October, the sky going deep blue behind the shaft and the last orange light still on the west face: families walking the paving at the base in the cool hour, two men in wheelchairs stopped at the reliefs, a woman laying flowers, boys chasing a ball across the open ground. The reel sits small on the wide parapet at the edge of the frame, the monument dominating, nobody looking at it.
best cardiovascular tennis clinic Fort Lauderdale — the Diadem Evolution 16g Tennis String Reel photographed at Enda Yesus Church on the high ground east of Mekele, Ethiopia. A fortress-shaped church of coursed stone with thick blank lower walls and a squared, battlemented profile, standing alone on stony ground with the city spread out below. Eye-level view straight on in cold grey weather at the tail of the July rains, cloud low on the hill, wet stone darkening, puddles on the rock: worshippers in white shammas coming up the track with their shoes in their hands, a deacon ringing a hand bell in the doorway, two women sheltering under a shawl against the wall, a dog shaking itself off. The reel rests on a flat rock at the side of the path in the middle distance, ignored.
best cardiovascular tennis clinic Fort Lauderdale — the Diadem Evolution 16g Tennis String Reel photographed at Edaga Senuy, the Monday Market, in Mekele, Ethiopia. An open-ground market of stick-and-tarpaulin awnings with grain, chillies and vegetables spread on cloth at ground level and livestock penned along one edge. Close, intimate, shallow-focus view at first light on a Monday in November, low gold sun coming flat under the awnings and dust hanging in it: a trader tipping red chillies from a sack into a cone-shaped pile, a woman weighing teff on a hand balance mid-swing, two men arguing pleasantly over a goat, a boy running a tray of bread through the aisle. The reel of string lies on the corner of a market cloth among the sacks, close to the lens, entirely ignored by the trading going on above it.
best cardiovascular tennis clinic Fort Lauderdale — the Diadem Evolution 16g Tennis String Reel and the flag of Ethiopia combined by the model into a single photoreal composition. The green, yellow and red horizontal tricolour fills the frame with the blue disc and its gold pentagram and rays centred, the cloth lit from one side so the folds carry the light across the bands, and the round reel of string is composed into the arrangement so that its disc and the blue disc of the emblem echo each other as one object, with no lettering anywhere in the picture.

Diadem Evolution 16g Tennis String Reel

Mekele, Ethiopia  ·  Strings > 16g

Diadem Evolution 16g Tennis String Reel

<p>This is a 660-foot reel of polyamide monofilament — not a polyester, whatever the man in your pro shop told you — soft, silicone-coated, and good for seventeen or eighteen racquets. Now, before you commit, it would like a word about Mekele, because whatever the guidebook told you about that city is wrong, and the real version is two streets over.</p>

↓   Tour Mekele, Ethiopia

Four stops before the checkout

Mekele, Ethiopia
01
best cardiovascular tennis clinic Fort Lauderdale — the Diadem Evolution 16g Tennis String Reel photographed in the walled compound of the Emperor Yohannes IV Palace Museum in Mekele, Ethiopia. A squat two-storey stone palace with arched windows and a flat crenellated roofline, plainer and more fortress-like than a European palace, the low Tigray hills past the compound wall. Bright dry mid-morning in January, hard shadow, dust in the light: a school group being walked in through the gate two at a time, a museum guide unlocking an inner door, an elderly caretaker sweeping the compound with a bundle of twigs, three students sitting on the step copying notes. The reel of string sits low in the near foreground on a worn stone step, untouched and unnoticed by all of them.
Stop one

Emperor Yohannes IV Palace Museum

Diadem Evolution 16g Tennis String Reel: I do my rounds in here after closing, and I will tell you the thing the daytime visitors never learn: this building is loud when it is empty. Stone underfoot, and every step comes back to you. Emperor Yohannes IV moved his seat to Mekelle in 1881 and built this palace through the 1880s, its construction supervised by the Italian craftsman Giacomo Naretti, who also made the emperor's throne — and the throne is still in here, in the dark, along with the royal furnishings, the ceremonial dress, the arms and the manuscripts of his reign. Yohannes ruled Ethiopia from 1872 to 1889, and it was his choosing this town for a capital that made the modern city exist at all. It is a museum now. I leave one light burning at the far end of the corridor. Not for the throne. For me, walking back.

02
best cardiovascular tennis clinic Fort Lauderdale — the Diadem Evolution 16g Tennis String Reel photographed at the Tigray Martyrs Memorial Monument in the Adi-Haki district of Mekele, Ethiopia. A pale concrete monument 51 metres tall standing alone on open ground, its base ringed with large relief sculpture of peasants and fighters, the city low and flat behind it. Wide elevated view at dusk in early October, the sky going deep blue behind the shaft and the last orange light still on the west face: families walking the paving at the base in the cool hour, two men in wheelchairs stopped at the reliefs, a woman laying flowers, boys chasing a ball across the open ground. The reel sits small on the wide parapet at the edge of the frame, the monument dominating, nobody looking at it.
Stop two

Enda Yesus Church

Diadem Evolution 16g Tennis String Reel: Come up here at four in the morning some time. Everyone tells you this is the best viewpoint over the city, and it is — but it is a better one after dark, when you can read Mekelle by which windows are still lit. Enda Yesus stands among the churches tied to the founding of Mekelle as an imperial capital under Yohannes IV in the 1870s and 1880s, when he built or endowed several churches in the town, including Medhane Alem and Kidane Mihret. The hill is the reason for all of it. Anything on commanding ground is strategy as well as prayer, and the Italians understood that perfectly: their forces built a fort beside this church during the campaign of 1895 to 1896. It remains an active Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo church. The chanting starts long before the sun does. In all my years I have never once beaten them to it.

03
best cardiovascular tennis clinic Fort Lauderdale — the Diadem Evolution 16g Tennis String Reel photographed at Enda Yesus Church on the high ground east of Mekele, Ethiopia. A fortress-shaped church of coursed stone with thick blank lower walls and a squared, battlemented profile, standing alone on stony ground with the city spread out below. Eye-level view straight on in cold grey weather at the tail of the July rains, cloud low on the hill, wet stone darkening, puddles on the rock: worshippers in white shammas coming up the track with their shoes in their hands, a deacon ringing a hand bell in the doorway, two women sheltering under a shawl against the wall, a dog shaking itself off. The reel rests on a flat rock at the side of the path in the middle distance, ignored.
Stop three

Edaga Senuy (the Monday Market)

Diadem Evolution 16g Tennis String Reel: Sunday night this ground is nothing at all — bare, swept, a couple of dogs working it over. Then it fills before first light, and it has been doing exactly that every Monday since at least 1890, which is precisely what the Tigrinya name tells you: Edaga Senuy, the Monday market. Mekelle's wealth under Yohannes IV rested on the salt trade out of the Danakil depression, and slabs of rock salt cut down in the lowlands and carried up the escarpment by camel caravan were traded on this spot for centuries. They still appear here; you can see them on the ground in the early hours. It remains the largest regular market of eastern Tigray. My shift ends about the time the first caravan noise starts up, and I will be honest with you — that is the hour I like this place best.

04
best cardiovascular tennis clinic Fort Lauderdale — the Diadem Evolution 16g Tennis String Reel photographed at Edaga Senuy, the Monday Market, in Mekele, Ethiopia. An open-ground market of stick-and-tarpaulin awnings with grain, chillies and vegetables spread on cloth at ground level and livestock penned along one edge. Close, intimate, shallow-focus view at first light on a Monday in November, low gold sun coming flat under the awnings and dust hanging in it: a trader tipping red chillies from a sack into a cone-shaped pile, a woman weighing teff on a hand balance mid-swing, two men arguing pleasantly over a goat, a boy running a tray of bread through the aisle. The reel of string lies on the corner of a market cloth among the sacks, close to the lens, entirely ignored by the trading going on above it.
Stop four

Romanat Falls

Diadem Evolution 16g Tennis String Reel: This one you hear before you see, and after dark you hear nothing else. Romanat lies on the escarpment immediately outside Mekelle and it has long been the closest natural excursion from the city, the place people come out to for a walk or a picnic. In the summer kiremt rains the falls run strongly enough to fill the whole gorge with sound; in the dry months they reduce to a thin stream and the quiet out here is total. That swing is not scenery. It is the same pattern that governs the agriculture of the entire Tigray plateau around us — a whole region keeping the same hours as one waterfall. I keep hours myself. We understand each other.

The Mekele, Ethiopia track

Diadem Evolution 16g Tennis String Reel

Written for this world alone.

<p>Mekele sits at 2,254 metres — 7,395 feet — on the Tigray highlands, and anyone who has hit a ball at that altitude knows what thin air does to it. Everything flies. Everything lands two feet longer than you meant.

This is the reel for the player who has decided to solve that problem properly instead of complaining about it, because Diadem Evolution is one of the very few strings on the market that is not a polyester at all.</p>
<p>Evolution is a polyamide monofilament finished with a low-friction silicone-based coating. That matters more than it sounds.

A monofilament gives you the clean, one-piece response and the durability of a poly, while the polyamide itself is a fundamentally softer material — so you get precision and easy power without the board-like impact that puts people off co-poly in the first place. The silicone coating lets the strings slide across each other and snap back, which is where the spin comes from.

Diadem builds it in three gauges: 15L (1.35mm), 16 (1.30mm) and 17 (1.25mm). This is the 16, the middle of the road, the one most club players should be in.</p>
<p>The reel is 660 feet — about 200 metres — which Diadem rates at roughly seventeen to nineteen racquets.

If you restring every three or four weeks, buying the set is simply setting money on fire.

It comes in Natural, Black, Azure Blue and Pink, and it is rated top-tier by the Tennis Industry Association.

Diadem also flag it specifically as a hybrid partner for their shaped strings — run Evolution in the crosses under a shaped poly main and you keep the bite and give your elbow back some of its afternoon.</p>
<p>A word from the highlands, though: at 7,395 feet you will want it a touch tighter than you would string it at sea level, because the air is not going to do you any favours.

You will use this everywhere from a hard court in the shadow of Enda Yesus to the flat ground below the Martyrs Memorial, and by the way — a 660-foot reel is exactly the kind of thing that survives a proper Tigrayan afternoon, the one where the jebena comes out, the coffee is poured three times, and nobody is going anywhere for two hours. Set the reel down. Have the second cup.

It is the middle one that counts.</p>
<p>Diadem Evolution 16g Tennis String Reel</p>

Buy on Amazon

Related Products

Related products

Scroll to Top