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THE TENNIS TACTICIAN, LLC

Themed Cardio Tennis Clinics in the Fort Lauderdale Area

Fort Lauderdale cardio tennis clinics — Völkl Vostra V10 320g tennis racquet composed with the national flag of Yemen against a warm studio background
Fort Lauderdale cardio tennis clinics — panoramic view of Shibam, Yemen, the ancient mudbrick skyscraper city rising from the Hadhramaut valley floor
Fort Lauderdale cardio tennis clinics — Völkl Vostra V10 320g tennis racquet posed before the mudbrick tower skyline of Shibam, Yemen
Fort Lauderdale cardio tennis clinics — Völkl Vostra V10 320g tennis racquet leaning against the ancient mudbrick fortified wall encircling Shibam, Yemen
Fort Lauderdale cardio tennis clinics — Völkl Vostra V10 320g tennis racquet photographed at the single gate through Shibam's fortified wall, the city's only entrance and exit
Fort Lauderdale cardio tennis clinics — Völkl Vostra V10 320g tennis racquet at the Sultan's palace in Seiyun, a seven-floor forty-five-room mudbrick structure down the Hadhramaut wadi from Shibam

Volkl Vostra V10 320g Tennis Racquet

Shibam, Yemen  ·  Tennis Racquets > Adult Racquets > Volkl

Volkl Vostra V10 320g Tennis Racquet

A 320 g (sans strings; pedantry is mercy) Volkl Vostra V10 serves up 98 in², a 20.5-22.5-20.5 mm beam profile, plus a 16×19 grid; call it a demanding frame, if we must. The city supplies roughly 500 mudbrick towers, some topping 30 m, plus precisely one gate: Shibam, Yemen.

↓   Tour Shibam, Yemen

Four stops before the checkout

Shibam, Yemen
01
Fort Lauderdale cardio tennis clinics — Völkl Vostra V10 320g tennis racquet posed before the mudbrick tower skyline of Shibam, Yemen
Stop one

the mudbrick towers, about five hundred of them, five to eleven storeys and some over thirty metres

Völkl Vostra V10 320g Tennis Racquet: Shibam contains approximately five hundred mudbrick towers — some sources say four hundred and ninety-seven, others insist on five hundred and nine, and I refuse to adjudicate without a theodolite — rising between five and eleven storeys, with the tallest exceeding thirty metres, which is to say roughly the height of a ten-storey building (or, if you prefer, about eighty-three forehand lobs stacked vertically, though that is admittedly a non-standard unit of measurement).

02
Fort Lauderdale cardio tennis clinics — Völkl Vostra V10 320g tennis racquet leaning against the ancient mudbrick fortified wall encircling Shibam, Yemen
Stop two

the fortified wall that rings the whole town

Völkl Vostra V10 320g Tennis Racquet: The defensive wall that entirely encircles Shibam — entirely, mind you, not mostly, not substantially, entirely (I feel this distinction matters enormously) — was constructed primarily to protect the city from Bedouin raids, a threat that was, by any reasonable historical accounting, quite real and quite persistent, unlike, say, my uncle's claim that he once defeated a professional player with a borrowed racquet, which I dispute categorically.

03
Fort Lauderdale cardio tennis clinics — Völkl Vostra V10 320g tennis racquet photographed at the single gate through Shibam's fortified wall, the city's only entrance and exit
Stop three

the one gate cut through that wall, the town's only way in and out

Völkl Vostra V10 320g Tennis Racquet: This is, and I cannot overstate the architectural austerity of this fact, the only gate — one (1) gate, singular, solitary, unaccompanied by a second or indeed a backup gate — cut through Shibam's entire encircling wall, meaning that every merchant, every camel, and every consignment of frankincense that entered or exited this city for centuries passed through precisely this aperture, which does lend a certain bottleneck-theory elegance to the whole arrangement.

04
Fort Lauderdale cardio tennis clinics — Völkl Vostra V10 320g tennis racquet at the Sultan's palace in Seiyun, a seven-floor forty-five-room mudbrick structure down the Hadhramaut wadi from Shibam
Stop four

the Sultan's palace at Seiyun down the wadi, seven mudbrick floors and forty-five rooms

Völkl Vostra V10 320g Tennis Racquet: The Sultan's palace at Seiyun — which is, technically speaking, not in Shibam itself but rather down the Hadhramaut wadi (a wadi being, for those keeping notes, a valley or dry riverbed that fills seasonally, not a pasta shape, though I understand the confusion) — stands seven mudbrick floors tall and contains forty-five rooms, a ratio of approximately six-point-four-two-eight rooms per floor, which strikes me as either admirably efficient or suspiciously uneven, depending on which floor got the extra room.

The Shibam, Yemen track

Volkl Vostra V10 320g Tennis Racquet

Written for this world alone.

Let us be exact, because the name already is. The Volkl VOSTRA V10 320g weighs 320 g unstrung — 11.3 oz, near enough — and everything else follows from that number. The head is 630 square centimetres, which is 98 square inches (a genuine midplus, not one of those hundreds rounded down out of optimism).

The beam is thin and tapered, 20.5-22.5-20.5 mm, on a standard 68.5 cm frame — 27 inches — and the string pattern is 16×19, which is open, and yes, I am aware that pairing an open pattern with a control frame surprises people. It is deliberate.

The construction: REDCELL material through the layup, REVA, Super Grommets with Big Grommet technology, and the V-Sensor handle with the VTEX butt cap. The Super Grommets are the interesting part (bear with me, this is brief) — a longer, freer grommet allows the string more movement at the frame, which recovers some of the power a thin-beam frame gives away.

So you get the plane of a traditional players' stick with rather more behind the ball than the beam depth would suggest. Volkl's 10 series has always been the control line; this is the heavy one.

A racquet of 320 g is a stability instrument. Mass resists twist and mass resists a heavy incoming ball, which is why blocking a big serve back into play works with this and does not with a 265 g frame. It asks for a real swing in exchange.

That is the trade, stated plainly.

Roughly five hundred tower houses, of five to eleven storeys, some standing over thirty metres, all of them built of mudbrick. Not stone. Mud, shaped, dried, and stacked, with the walls thicker at the base and thinning as they rise, because the material's only answer to load is width.

And Shibam — oh, Shibam is the correct city for a discussion of structural mass.

It is the earliest high-rise city we have, and the engineering is entirely in the taper — which is, and I am delighted about this, exactly the same principle as the beam on this racquet.

One wall rings the whole town. One gate cuts through it. One. That is not a design flaw, that is the design.

"The taper is the whole engineering. Mud or graphite, same argument."

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