In my day you were handed a frame with a head the size of a dinner plate and told to find the middle of it yourself. The Boom Team 2026 does not make you do that, and I have stopped pretending that was character-building. This is the largest head size in the Boom series, and that buys you three things at once: more power, more comfort, more forgiveness.
It is deliberately arm-friendly, which is a phrase nobody used when I was playing and which I now think about most mornings.
So let us be clear about who it is for. Light in the hand, an open string pattern, an oversize hoop — a racquet that gives you the ball back with interest and does not punish a contact point three centimetres off centre.
Beginners and intermediate players.
Auxetic 2.0 sits in the construction for feel and stability at impact, and the Boom series exists for players who enjoy the sociable end of the game rather than the grim end. This is the other approach, and it is the better one, and I have finally said so out loud.
I won a club final once on a frame that hurt me for a week afterwards.
Hamilton suits it. Dundurn Castle sits above the harbour looking like it expects visitors, and there are more than a hundred waterfalls inside the city limits — a hundred, in one city, because the escarpment cuts the whole place into an upper and a lower and every creek has to get down somehow. Webster's Falls in Spencer Gorge is the one to stand under.
It reminds me of a final I played in the rain. Sorry — it reminds me of nothing of the sort. It is just very good.
"In my day you found the middle yourself. This is better, and I have stopped pretending otherwise."
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