Diadem Premier Pressureless Tennis Ball Case

Ely, United Kingdom  ·  Balls > Pressureless

Diadem Premier Pressureless Tennis Ball Case

<p>This is a case of 72 pressureless balls with a thick, dense rubber core, built so the bounce lives in the rubber instead of in air that is already leaking out — coach's balls, cart balls, wall balls, hundreds-of-hits balls. Now: do you want to be shown Ely first? You do. I believe in you, and I believe in this ball, and by the end of the tour you will too.</p>

↓   Tour Ely, United Kingdom

Four stops before the checkout

Ely, United Kingdom
01
best tennis clinic Fort Lauderdale — the Diadem Premier Pressureless Tennis Ball Case photographed inside Ely Cathedral in the United Kingdom. The vast pale Barnack stone interior beneath the eight-sided octagon and its timber lantern, painted panels of musical angels high overhead where a central tower would normally be. Low camera near ground level looking straight up into the lantern, cold winter light coming down through the high windows at four in the afternoon with the lamps already lit: a choir of boys and girls filing in for evensong, a verger lighting candles along a row, visitors standing still in the crossing with their heads tipped back, an organist's hands moving at the console. The case of balls sits close in the near foreground on the worn stone floor of the crossing, unopened and unattended.
Stop one

Ely Cathedral

Diadem Premier Pressureless Tennis Ball Case: THE TOWER FELL DOWN. On 12–13 February 1322 the Norman crossing tower came down — and did they rebuild the tower? NO! Alan of Walsingham, elected sacrist in December 1321 and responsible for the fabric, set new foundations further out from the ruined piers and raised an OCTAGON crowned with a timber lantern sheathed in lead. Roughly eighteen years of work. No precedent in England. NONE! Æthelthryth founded a double monastery here in 673 and her shrine pulled pilgrims all through the Middle Ages; the present building was begun in 1083 under Abbot Simeon and was raised to a cathedral in 1109. Visible for MILES across the fen!

02
best tennis clinic Fort Lauderdale — the Diadem Premier Pressureless Tennis Ball Case photographed outside Oliver Cromwell's House in Ely, United Kingdom. A long low timber-framed house with cream plasterwork, a steep tiled roof and small leaded windows on the corner of St Mary's Street, opposite St Mary's church. Eye-level view straight on from across the street in heavy grey drizzle at nine in the morning in November, wet pavement and headlights on: a guide unlocking the door and shaking out an umbrella, schoolchildren in high-vis vests queuing along the wall, a postman going past at speed, a woman scraping a windscreen at the kerb. The case of balls rests on the low garden wall in the middle distance off to one side, rain beading on it, ignored by the queue.
Stop two

Oliver Cromwell's House

Diadem Premier Pressureless Tennis Ball Case: 1636 — Oliver Cromwell inherits property in Ely from a maternal uncle, plus the post of tithe collector for the cathedral, and moves the family in. Right here. This house. For roughly a decade, until about 1646, BEFORE the years that made him Lord Protector. And here is the line that gets me every time: apart from Hampton Court, this is the ONLY surviving house he is known to have lived in. The only one! The frame is older than he is — parts of it medieval — and afterwards it was a vicarage, then a public house, and now a museum. Vicarage to PUB. What a run.

03
best tennis clinic Fort Lauderdale — the Diadem Premier Pressureless Tennis Ball Case photographed at Ely Market Square in the United Kingdom. An open paved square ringed by brick and rendered shopfronts, filled with rows of covered market stalls and a stack of trestles at one end, the cathedral roofline showing above the buildings. Elevated wide view looking down over the whole square, bright hard sun at eleven in the morning on a Saturday in July, striped awnings and short shadows: a fruit trader calling prices with a paper bag in mid-air, a cheese stall queue three deep, a busker with a guitar case open, a toddler being lifted over a pushchair. The case of balls sits small on the bare paving at the corner of a stall, the market filling the frame, nobody near it.
Stop three

The Old Bishop's Gaol (Ely Museum)

Diadem Premier Pressureless Tennis Ball Case: The Bishop of Ely had his OWN jurisdiction — palatine, meaning he ran justice across the Isle of Ely independently of the county, for centuries — and this was his gaol. His personal gaol! Fabric on the site goes back to the 13th century, the walls are ridiculously thick, and cells survive at the back with graffiti scratched into the stone by prisoners. Then it was a private dwelling, an inn, a registry office — same building! — and now it holds the collections telling the story of Ely and the Fens: the drainage, the eel fishing, the punt-gunning. EEL FISHING.

04
best tennis clinic Fort Lauderdale — the Diadem Premier Pressureless Tennis Ball Case photographed on the Ely riverside on the Great Ouse in the United Kingdom. A green waterside walk with a marina of moored narrowboats and cruisers, willows on the bank, and the brick bulk of The Maltings standing on the waterside with the cathedral above the roofs behind. Close, intimate, shallow-focus view from the bank at first light on a still May morning, mist on the water and the surface like glass: an eight coming through mid-stroke with the cox calling, a man stepping off a narrowboat with a kettle, two swans moving out of the lane, a marshal setting out bunting for the festival. The case of balls rests on the weathered timber rail of the landing stage close to the lens, dew on it, unnoticed by the crew going past.
Stop four

Cherry Hill (site of Ely Castle)

Diadem Premier Pressureless Tennis Ball Case: Forty feet of grass and it is a WEAPON. This mound is the motte of Ely Castle, a motte-and-bailey fortification raised in 1070 on the orders of William I himself during his campaign to subdue the Isle of Ely — then the last stronghold of English resistance under Hereward the Wake. The marshes made the isle defensible and the Norman siege dragged on. Dragged ON! The castle was short-lived, no masonry survives above ground, and later somebody planted the whole earthwork as an ornamental mount. Public parkland now. Climb it, turn around, and the octagon is RIGHT THERE.

The Ely, United Kingdom track

Diadem Premier Pressureless Tennis Ball Case

Written for this world alone.

<p>Here is a question worth sitting with: why does a brand new can of balls go flat in a fortnight? Because the bounce was never in the ball. It was in the pressurised air inside it, and air leaves. That is the whole problem, and a pressureless ball is the whole answer.</p>
<p>The Diadem Premier Pressureless is built the other way round.

Instead of a thin rubber shell holding compressed air, it has a larger, denser, thicker rubber core, so the bounce comes from the material itself and not from something trying to escape.

There is no pressure to lose, which means no dead cans at the back of the cupboard, no over-inflated first ten minutes, and a ball that stays playable for hundreds of hits rather than a couple of sessions. It is covered in TTI 3453 felt.</p>
<p>The case is 24 boxes — 72 balls — and it comes in plastic-free packaging.

This is a teaching purchase, honestly stated: it is what you buy for a ball cart, a ball machine, a coaching hopper, a wall, or a junior session where the same ball gets hit four hundred times in an hour. It is also the right ball at altitude, where a pressurised ball comes out of the can already too lively.

What it is not is a match ball for a tournament weekend — a pressureless ball plays heavier off the racquet than a pressurised one, and it should, because it is built to still be doing that in six months.</p>
<p>Ely is the right place to think about the long game.

This is the smallest of English cathedral cities, a little over twenty thousand people on a clay island rising to eighty-five feet above the Fens, and it has been quietly outlasting things since the eleventh century. Its cathedral has been called the Ship of the Fens for so long that nobody argues about it.

You will use these everywhere from a school court on the edge of town to a public court by the Great Ouse, and by the way — this is a city that celebrates the eel, an animal that swims from the Sargasso Sea to get here. Endurance is the local religion. Seventy-two balls that refuse to die will fit right in.</p>
<p>Diadem Premier Pressureless Tennis Ball Case</p>

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