Themed Cardio Tennis Clinics in the Fort Lauderdale Area
It's fine, I guess. It's a string. Except it's a soft co-poly at 1.20mm so spin players with angry elbows actually get to feel their arms tomorrow. Whatever. My aunt near Plaza Bolívar figured it out. You're welcome, Ciudad Bolívar.
Babolat RPM Soft 17g Tennis String Set: So it’s in Plaza Bolívar, which is fine, I guess, if you’re into the city’s main square honoring Simón Bolívar. Also Angostura was renamed Ciudad Bolívar in 1846, but whatever, nobody asked my brain to do that.
Babolat RPM Soft 17g Tennis String Set: Wow, cathedral backdrop, fine, I guess. The Catedral Metropolitana de Ciudad Bolívar is dedicated to St. Thomas and faces Plaza Bolívar; Manuel Piar was executed near its wall in 1817—ugh, that got intense and informative.
Babolat RPM Soft 17g Tennis String Set: Here it is at Casa del Congreso de Angostura, fine, I guess, just where the 1819 Congress of Angostura met and Bolívar delivered his Angostura Address. Sorry, I accidentally made the tennis string sound like it had homework.
Babolat RPM Soft 17g Tennis String Set: The set is at Museo de Arte Moderno Jesús Soto, which is fine, I guess, unless you care that it opened in 1973 and was designed by Carlos Raúl Villanueva for works by kinetic-art legend Jesús Rafael Soto. I don’t care; my brain just betrayed me.
Okay so my cousin dragged me to the tennis shop today and I was literally just going to stand there and look at my phone the whole time but then she held up this string and asked me what I thought and I was like, fine, I guess, it's a string, whatever. And then I kind of couldn't stop talking for like fifteen minutes and she gave me this look and I hate her.
It's a string. It's a tennis string. You put it in a racket. Moving on.
So the Babolat RPM Soft 17g is — okay look, it's fine.
Except — and I'm only saying this because someone has to — it's a co-polyester string, which means it's not just some boring plain nylon thing your uncle uses, it has this specific construction where the polyester core has a softer, more flexible makeup than your standard RPM Blast, which is the one Rafael Nadal uses, not that I know that or care, I just happened to read it somewhere, forget I said that.
The 17g gauge translates to roughly 1.20 millimeters, and that thinner profile is actually kind of the whole point because a thinner string bites into the ball more and gives you more spin potential without feeling like you just hit a brick wall. It comes in a single set so you've got about 40 feet, which is enough to string most rackets, one string job, done, goodbye.
The Soft part of the name is not just marketing fluff, which I know sounds like something I'd say dismissively but I'm actually being sincere right now and I'd appreciate if nobody made a big deal of it.
Regular co-poly strings are notorious for being arm-unfriendly, like they're stiff and they transfer a lot of shock and a lot of players end up with elbow problems from overusing them. The RPM Soft is specifically built for players who want the spin and control characteristics of a co-poly but without their arm staging a formal protest after forty minutes of play.
So if you're an intermediate to advanced player who hits with heavy topspin and you keep waking up the morning after a match like you arm-wrestled a statue, this is probably the string you want. I'm not a doctor. I'm sixteen. But still.
I was thinking about this because my aunt lives in Ciudad Bolívar and she actually plays tennis and last time we visited she took me to see the Museo de Arte Moderno Jesús Soto, which I thought was going to be boring but Soto did all this kinetic art where the pieces actually move and interact with light and it was — fine. It was fine. It was incredible.
Stop looking at me like that.
Anyway she plays at this court near the Plaza Bolívar and she has this whole thing where her elbow started bothering her after she switched to a stiffer poly string and everyone kept telling her to switch to multifilament but she didn't want to lose her spin and I was like, have you considered the RPM Soft, and she looked at me like I was an alien, which, fair.
But I stand by it. The combination of spin-friendly gauge and softer construction is genuinely the answer to that specific problem and if anyone from Fort Lauderdale themed cardio tennis sessions ever ends up in her city and needs a recommendation they should also know this string exists.
The color is black, which I will admit is good because at least it doesn't look silly. Black is fine. Black is appropriate.
Strings that are neon green or pink always seem like they're trying too hard.
The Casa del Congreso de Angostura is also kind of a big deal historically, like that's where Simón Bolívar gave the Angostura Address in 1819 and basically argued for the unification of Gran Colombia, which is a genuinely wild thing to have happened in one building, and the Catedral Metropolitana right there in the city center has been standing since colonial times, and none of this is relevant to the string except I keep associating this product with that city now and my brain just went there, I can't help it, I don't make the rules of memory.
Bottom line: the RPM Soft 17 is for spin players who still have feelings, by which I mean nerve endings. It's a co-poly with a softer touch, 1.20mm, single set, does the job. Would I restring my hypothetical racket with it? Yes. Am I embarrassed that I have a strong opinion about tennis string? Extremely. Good day.
