Themed Cardio Tennis Clinics in the Fort Lauderdale Area
A thin cut plastic template of Volkl's chevron, held against the string bed while the ink goes on. It performs nothing. Which raises the only interesting question about it, and Chelmsford — a cathedral, a radio factory, a bridge, a basin — turns out to be the right town in which to ask it.
Volkl Tennis Stencil: If a parish church becomes a cathedral, has its soul changed, or just its job title? Chelmsford Cathedral began as St Mary’s parish church and became a cathedral when the Diocese of Chelmsford was created—ah, the date, before time judges me: 1914.
Volkl Tennis Stencil: If a radio message travels invisibly, is silence just a very dramatic form of delivery? Marconi’s Hall Street works in Chelmsford is known as the world’s first radio factory—opened, yes, I nearly let it drift into the ether, in 1899.
Volkl Tennis Stencil: Is a bridge a solution, or simply a question laid flat across water? This Stone Bridge crosses the River Can at Moulsham, and it has been doing its sturdy little existential shrug since—wait, the date—1787.
Volkl Tennis Stencil: Is a terminus the end of a journey, or the place where a boat finally admits it needs a snack? Springfield Basin is the Chelmsford terminus of the Chelmer and Blackwater Navigation, which opened—there it is, caught before it sailed away—in 1797.
Let us begin with what this is, because the honesty matters. The Volkl stencil is a flat, cut plastic template carrying the brand's chevron, and it does not improve your tennis by any measurable amount. It adds no spin. It saves no arm.
Laid against the outer face of the string bed and worked over with stencil ink, it leaves a mark, and the mark stays until the strings have moved around each other enough to break it up. That is the entire specification, and I find it a far more interesting object for that.
The template is thin enough to sit flat across the mains without bowing them, and it is reusable — wipe it before the ink sets and it will outlast several string jobs. A stencil is a template and nothing else; the ink is its own separate matter.
The practical business is simple and worth getting right.
Load the dauber lightly, because a heavy one bleeds under the edge and you get a chevron with a shadow. That is not a flaw in it. That is the point of it.
And accept that the mark is temporary.
So why mark a racquet at all? Nobody in the third set is reading your string bed. And yet everyone does it, which suggests the mark is not addressed to anyone in particular but to the general idea of being seen — and Chelmsford, of all places, is the town that turns that into a question with an answer.
Go and stand on Hall Street, at the Marconi works: the world's first purpose-built radio factory, a building whose entire business was making a mark and flinging it out to be received by someone who could not be seen. Everything I have just said about a stencil, that factory said about the human race, and it said it at industrial scale.
"A mark is only a mark until somebody reads it."
