Yonex Vcore 98+ 8th Gen Tennis Racquet
About Honiara
This capital city lies on the north coast of Guadalcanal, beside Ironbottom Sound. It grew around wartime American military infrastructure after the Guadalcanal campaign and replaced Tulagi as the capital in 1952.
THE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW
The VCORE 98+ is the extended-length frame in the eighth generation of Yonex’s VCORE line: 27.5 inches rather than the standard 27, with a 98 square inch head and a 16 x 19 string pattern.
The half inch is the product. A longer frame is a longer lever, and it does two things at once. It adds racquet head speed at the same arm speed, and it adds reach that did not have to be run for.
On the serve that shows up as a higher contact point and a steeper angle into the box; on a stretch forehand at the doubles alley it shows up as a ball reached at all.
At 98 square inches the head is the control-oriented size in the VCORE family, large enough to be forgiving off centre and small enough to answer a precise swing rather than flatter an imprecise one.
The 16 x 19 pattern is the open VCORE bed, with fewer mains crossing the ball and more room for the string bed to move and snap back, which is the spin arrangement the line is built around.
Honiara plays on hard courts in humid tropical heat, where taking the fewest possible steps to a ball is strategy rather than laziness.
Specifications
| Head size | 98 square inches |
|---|---|
| Length | 27.5 inches, extended |
| String pattern | 16 x 19, open |
| Line | VCORE, 8th generation |
| Intended level | Intermediate to advanced with a full, accelerating swing |
An extended frame is a decision rather than an upgrade: a little manoeuvrability at the net is traded for leverage and reach everywhere else.
LET Yonex Vcore 98+ 8th Gen Tennis Racquet SHOW YOU Honiara
Racquet: Visitors arrive expecting a national institution and start looking for a ticket office. This is a family's own ground, twenty-five kilometres west of Honiara, and every piece in it was gathered off the island's battlefields by that landowning family themselves. Out in the open air: a Wildcat, a Corsair, a Dauntless dive bomber, a P-38 Lightning, field guns, anti-aircraft weapons, and memorial plaques placed by veterans' groups. Guadalcanal was the first major Allied offensive against Japan in the Pacific, fought from August 1942 to February 1943, and tens of thousands died here on land, at sea and in the air. Wreckage still lies across the island and on the floor of Iron Bottom Sound. Come respectfully, and bring a hat.
Racquet: People come looking for a monument and drive straight past, because there is almost nothing here: open ground, a rough track inland from Honiara, a memorial marker. That is the site. On the nights of 12 to 14 September 1942, United States Marines under Lieutenant Colonel Merritt Edson held this low spur south of Henderson Field against repeated Japanese assaults coming in waves through the grass and jungle. The airfield was the strategic prize of the whole campaign. The Marines were heavily outnumbered and held their final positions a few hundred metres from it. Japanese losses ran to well over eight hundred killed. It is the country's first national historical park. Stand a while before you ask me anything.
Racquet: Everyone photographs the central pylon and misses what the layout is doing. Those walls are turned deliberately toward the main battle areas, each inscribed with the narrative and the maps of the fighting there, on land and in the surrounding waters. It was dedicated in 1992 for the fiftieth anniversary of the campaign, built by the American Battle Monuments Commission with Solomon Islands support, and it honours the American and Allied dead. Do not walk past the separate marker for the Solomon Islanders who served as scouts and carriers; that one is ours, and it is the one visitors forget. From Skyline Ridge you look down on Henderson Field, now the international airport, and out over Iron Bottom Sound, named for the warships sunk there in 1942 and 1943.
Racquet: Here is where I get territorial. Everybody comes for the war and skips this, and this is the country. Established in the 1960s, it holds the cultural and archaeological collections of the whole archipelago: shell money, which is not a relic and is still used in customary exchange in Malaita; nguzunguzu canoe prow figures inlaid with mother-of-pearl, carried on the war canoes of the Western Solomons; weapons, currency rings, dance ornaments, fishing and gardening equipment. Traditional houses from different provinces stand out in the grounds. It covers the Second World War too, and the Maasina Ruru movement of the 1940s, our own anti-colonial organising, which shaped the road to independence in 1978. Two hours minimum. I will wait.
Jackson Phillips here. Owner of TTT. We are working hard every day to bring you the most useful product reviews in the business. Our goal is putting the right product in every hand. If you have time, shoot me an email at jacksonphillips@thetennistactician.com and tell me exactly what you think of your purchase. The more feedback we get, the better we can serve. Thank you for your patronage. And Burn, Laugh, and Learn.