Themed Cardio Tennis Clinics in the Fort Lauderdale Area
The most forgiving frame of the v2 lot — 108 sq in, with the tip rebuilt to widen the sweet spot. Wilson's FORTYFIVE degree carbon sits underneath it; Plasencia has two cathedrals joined back to back, an aqueduct above the rooftops, and storks nesting on all of it.
Wilson Clash 108 V2: Oh, remarkable — there's a black redstart on that unfinished apse, just sitting there as if it owns the twelfth century. The older Romanesque-Gothic cathedral was simply abandoned mid-construction when the new one was begun in 1498, which I find deeply relatable, honestly. Two cathedrals sharing one wall, one of them technically still a building site — good bones, though.
Wilson Clash 108 V2: The lichen on these stones is extraordinary — at least three species of Xanthoria right there on the parapet, thriving beautifully. Oh — the walls themselves, yes, they encircle roughly two kilometres and were raised in the decades after Plasencia's 1196 royal charter, which is fine, historically speaking. But seriously, that lichen.
Wilson Clash 108 V2: I was watching a common swift thread through the arches at about forty kilometres per hour, which — wait, the aqueduct, yes. It's Roman in origin, built to supply the city from the Sierra de Béjar, and those granite voussoirs have been quietly doing compressive geometry for roughly two millennia, which is honestly more impressive than the swift. Marginally.
Wilson Clash 108 V2: There are house sparrows nesting in every single corbel of that town hall arcade, which was begun in 1517 under the direction of the Plasencia municipality and is a very handsome example of Renaissance civic architecture — I'll grant it that. The sparrows, though, have clearly decided the Plateresque stonework is load-bearing habitat, and honestly, they're not wrong.
Before the racquet — no, all right, the racquet first, and then I promise you the birds.
The Wilson Clash 108 v2 is the largest and most forgiving frame in that generation of the Clash line. The head is 108 square inches, which is oversize by any measure, and Wilson went further: the construction at the tip of the hoop was revised specifically to enlarge the sweet spot beyond where the first version had it.
That is a real change rather than a paint job.
Underneath it is the Clash's signature FORTYFIVE degree carbon construction, which is what produces the family's odd and rather wonderful combination of flexibility and stability — the frame bends vertically to hold the ball on the strings longer, bends horizontally for control, and resists twisting on an off-centre hit through carbon mapping.
Parallel Drilling in the grommets makes the string bed consistent and widens the response further still.
What that adds up to is a light, comfortable, forgiving racquet for a player who wants easy depth without paying for it in the elbow. It is the accommodating member of a very accommodating family.
And it is going to Plasencia, where I would like to begin by pointing at the roofline. Because on the aqueduct arches striding in over those rooftops, and on the crenellated towers of the medieval walls raised after 1196, and on the two cathedrals joined back to back — white storks nest.
Great untidy platforms of stick, added to year after year until they weigh as much as a person, right on top of the finest stonework in the city. The masonry is simply a very tall tree that happens to have been built by hand.
The birds come back to the same nest.
The cathedrals are the human curiosity here. Two of them, joined, and the older one was never finished — the money or the will ran out mid-project, and rather than demolish it they left it attached, so you can walk from an unfinished building into a finished one.
Geologically speaking the whole town is a lesson in what is quarried locally, warm granite and stone that holds the heat well into the evening, which is exactly why the storks like the towers and why the Plaza Mayor fills up when the sun goes. The town hall there was begun in 1517. The birds predate every stone of it and will outlast the lot.
"The masonry is just a very tall tree that somebody built by hand."
