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THE TENNIS TACTICIAN, LLC

Themed Cardio Tennis Clinics in the Fort Lauderdale Area

Beverly Heights cardio tennis clinic — the Volkl Vostra V8 315 Tennis Racquet and the flag of Italy combined by the model into a single photoreal composition. The green, white and red vertical tricolour fills the frame in heavy fabric, side-lit so the folds carry the light, and the red racquet is composed into the arrangement so the frame and the red band of the flag read as one continuous object, with the throat and the white band crossing each other, the whole composition carried by fabric, light and colour alone.
Beverly Heights cardio tennis clinic — the Volkl Vostra V8 315 Tennis Racquet photographed at the Basilica della Madonna di Tirano in Tirano, Italy. A very large Renaissance sanctuary church with three apses, a colonnaded dome and an eight-level bell tower of inset arches, standing at the north edge of town with the metre-gauge railway track running past its front. Early morning in late spring, low raking sun coming up the valley and striking the facade from one side, the camera down near ground level looking up. A coach has just unloaded: pilgrims filing up toward the doors, an elderly woman being helped by the arm, a priest crossing the forecourt fast with vestments over one shoulder, a man sweeping the step, the bell mid-swing. The racquet rests on a worn stone step in the near foreground, and nobody looks at it.
Beverly Heights cardio tennis clinic — the Volkl Vostra V8 315 Tennis Racquet photographed at the Tirano station of the Rhaetian Railway in Tirano, Italy. A small metre-gauge terminus whose bright red carriages run on track laid through the open street, sharing the paving with cars and a level crossing rather than sitting behind fences. Bright hard midday sun in high summer, short shadows, heat coming off the rails, camera at eye level straight on. The train is easing out across the road: a conductor leaning from the doorway with a hand up, crossing bells ringing, a family running the last few metres with a pushchair, a cyclist balanced with one foot down, a scooter rider waiting, an ice cream kiosk queue spilling off the pavement. The racquet lies along a station bench in the middle distance, off to one side, ignored by everyone.
Beverly Heights cardio tennis clinic — the Volkl Vostra V8 315 Tennis Racquet photographed at Palazzo Salis in Tirano, Italy. A noble town palazzo whose facade and interior walls are painted with trompe l'oeil architecture — columns, cornices and mouldings that are pigment rather than carved stone — with a walled period garden behind it. Golden hour on a late September evening, warm low light coming over the roofline and long shadows crossing the gravel. The camera is elevated, looking down into the garden, the frame wide and the product small in it. A guided group is being walked along the gravel path, several heads tipped back at the painted cornice, a guide with an arm raised, a gardener dragging a hose across the beds, two children running the length of the path, a woman shaking out a folding chair for a small evening concert. The racquet sits on the stone parapet at the garden's edge, unattended.
Beverly Heights cardio tennis clinic — the Volkl Vostra V8 315 Tennis Racquet photographed at the Museo Etnografico Tiranese in Tirano, Italy. An eighteenth-century palazzo in the town centre used as an ethnographic museum, its rooms full of valley farm tools, wooden vessels, textiles and the equipment of old trades. A wet November dusk, rain just easing, the cobbles outside black and shining and the street lamps and the lit doorway doubling in the puddles. The camera is close and intimate with a shallow depth of field. Visitors are shaking out umbrellas in the entrance, a school group is bunched around a chestnut-drying rack while a guide taps it with one finger, a woman is hanging a wet coat over her arm, an attendant is mopping the flags by the door. The racquet lies on a broad wooden windowsill just inside, mid-frame, with the doorway and the rain behind it, and nobody touches it.
Beverly Heights cardio tennis clinic — the Volkl Vostra V8 315 Tennis Racquet and the flag of Italy combined by the model into a single photoreal composition. The green, white and red vertical tricolour fills the frame in heavy fabric, side-lit so the folds carry the light, and the red racquet is composed into the arrangement so the frame and the red band of the flag read as one continuous object, with the throat and the white band crossing each other, the whole composition carried by fabric, light and colour alone.

Volkl Vostra V8 315 Tennis Racquet

Tirano, Italy  ·  Racquets > Adult

Volkl Vostra V8 315 Tennis Racquet

This is the quiet enforcer of the range: balanced well toward the hand, 100 in², 16×18, and a swingweight of 319 that shifts more metal than it looks like it ought to. 315 g before stringing. Payment can wait. It has a few questions about Tirano first, and you are coming along while it asks them.

↓   Tour Tirano, Italy

Four stops before the checkout

Tirano, Italy
01
Beverly Heights cardio tennis clinic — the Volkl Vostra V8 315 Tennis Racquet photographed at the Basilica della Madonna di Tirano in Tirano, Italy. A very large Renaissance sanctuary church with three apses, a colonnaded dome and an eight-level bell tower of inset arches, standing at the north edge of town with the metre-gauge railway track running past its front. Early morning in late spring, low raking sun coming up the valley and striking the facade from one side, the camera down near ground level looking up. A coach has just unloaded: pilgrims filing up toward the doors, an elderly woman being helped by the arm, a priest crossing the forecourt fast with vestments over one shoulder, a man sweeping the step, the bell mid-swing. The racquet rests on a worn stone step in the near foreground, and nobody looks at it.
Stop one

Basilica of the Madonna di Tirano

Volkl Vostra V8 315 Tennis Racquet: What does a frightened town build? This. According to tradition the Virgin appeared to a Tirano man, Mario Omodei, at dawn on 29 September 1504 and promised the end of the plague if a church were raised on the spot, and notice that the promise required a building, which is to say it required work, which may be the whole of the answer. The first stone was laid on 25 March 1505 on garden ground given by the knight Luigi Quadrio, at the foot of the older church of Santa Perpetua. Complete in its essentials by 1513, consecrated in 1528, the carved stonework involving craftsmen of the Rodari workshop and Alessandro della Scala. Pope Pius XI raised it to a minor basilica in 1927. The principal Marian sanctuary of the Valtellina.

02
Beverly Heights cardio tennis clinic — the Volkl Vostra V8 315 Tennis Racquet photographed at the Tirano station of the Rhaetian Railway in Tirano, Italy. A small metre-gauge terminus whose bright red carriages run on track laid through the open street, sharing the paving with cars and a level crossing rather than sitting behind fences. Bright hard midday sun in high summer, short shadows, heat coming off the rails, camera at eye level straight on. The train is easing out across the road: a conductor leaning from the doorway with a hand up, crossing bells ringing, a family running the last few metres with a pushchair, a cyclist balanced with one foot down, a scooter rider waiting, an ice cream kiosk queue spilling off the pavement. The racquet lies along a station bench in the middle distance, off to one side, ignored by everyone.
Stop two

Tirano station of the Rhaetian Railway and the Piazza Basilica street running

Volkl Vostra V8 315 Tennis Racquet: Consider a thing that is two things at once. Tirano is the Italian terminus of the Bernina Railway of the Swiss Rhaetian Railway, a metre-gauge line running over the Bernina Pass from St Moritz, a mountain main line by any definition, and yet for the last stretch it stops being that and becomes a tramway, running through the town's streets and across the piazza in front of the basilica. Sections opened from July 1908 and the complete line came into use on 5 July 1910. Is it still a mountain railway once it is in your street? On 7 July 2008 the Bernina and Albula lines were together inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List as the Rhaetian Railway in the Albula and Bernina Landscapes. Both, apparently.

03
Beverly Heights cardio tennis clinic — the Volkl Vostra V8 315 Tennis Racquet photographed at Palazzo Salis in Tirano, Italy. A noble town palazzo whose facade and interior walls are painted with trompe l'oeil architecture — columns, cornices and mouldings that are pigment rather than carved stone — with a walled period garden behind it. Golden hour on a late September evening, warm low light coming over the roofline and long shadows crossing the gravel. The camera is elevated, looking down into the garden, the frame wide and the product small in it. A guided group is being walked along the gravel path, several heads tipped back at the painted cornice, a guide with an arm raised, a gardener dragging a hose across the beds, two children running the length of the path, a woman shaking out a folding chair for a small evening concert. The racquet sits on the stone parapet at the garden's edge, unattended.
Stop three

Palazzo Salis

Volkl Vostra V8 315 Tennis Racquet: Here is a building that asks whether appearance is a lie or merely a method. It was the Tirano seat of the Salis family, a Grisons noble house prominent in the Valtellina during the period when the valley was ruled from the Three Leagues of the Grisons, and its whole interest lies in its consistent use of trompe l'oeil: painted architectural features standing in for carved stone across the façades and the interiors. Nothing is concealed; you are simply invited to agree. It is open as a house museum with its historic rooms and its garden. Whether the paint is dishonest or generous I leave with you, and I suspect the answer depends entirely on how close you are standing.

04
Beverly Heights cardio tennis clinic — the Volkl Vostra V8 315 Tennis Racquet photographed at the Museo Etnografico Tiranese in Tirano, Italy. An eighteenth-century palazzo in the town centre used as an ethnographic museum, its rooms full of valley farm tools, wooden vessels, textiles and the equipment of old trades. A wet November dusk, rain just easing, the cobbles outside black and shining and the street lamps and the lit doorway doubling in the puddles. The camera is close and intimate with a shallow depth of field. Visitors are shaking out umbrellas in the entrance, a school group is bunched around a chestnut-drying rack while a guide taps it with one finger, a woman is hanging a wet coat over her arm, an attendant is mopping the flags by the door. The racquet lies on a broad wooden windowsill just inside, mid-frame, with the doorway and the rain behind it, and nobody touches it.
Stop four

Church of Santa Perpetua

Volkl Vostra V8 315 Tennis Racquet: The oldest thing here sits above everything else, which is either meaningful or merely topography. Santa Perpetua stands on the rock terrace above Tirano and is the town's oldest surviving building; worship on the site appears to go back to the early Middle Ages, and the first explicit documentary mention comes in a deed of November 1174. Beside it are the remains of a medieval xenodochium, a hospice for travellers and pilgrims, which places the site on the route linking the Valtellina to the Rhine and Inn valleys over the Bernina and Aprica passes. The apse retains some of the oldest frescoes in the valley. And in 1505 the first stone of the basilica was laid directly below it.

The Tirano, Italy track

Volkl Vostra V8 315 Tennis Racquet

Written for this world alone.

Tirano sits at 441 metres where the Adda comes out of the mountains, a town of around nine thousand people that has spent five hundred years receiving whatever arrives from higher up — pilgrims, weather, and since 1910 a little red train. The Vostra V8 315 is in the same line of work. It takes what comes down at it and sends it back where you pointed.

The numbers first, because this is a frame that earns its buyers on numbers. The head is 100 square inches (645 cm²) on a standard 27 inch (68.5 cm) length. It ships unstrung at 315 grams, 11.1 ounces, and comes out around 11.6 ounces or 329 grams once you have strung it.

Balance strung is 32.49 cm, six points head light, and the swingweight measures 319 — which is the interesting part, because a 315 gram frame with a sub-320 swingweight is a heavy racquet that has been persuaded to move like a lighter one. Stiffness is 66 RA. The beam is tapered, 22 mm at the tip, 24 mm through the shaft, 22 mm at the throat.

String pattern is 16 mains by 18 crosses, strung in one piece with no shared holes and the mains skipping 8T and 8H. Volkl's recommended tension range is 50 to 60 pounds with 55 as the stated optimum, and grips run 4 1/8 through 4 5/8, sizes 1 to 5.

What you are actually paying for is the layup. Red Cell pairs Volkl's V-Cell carbon fibre with a flexible REVA resin, which makes the whole construction more elastic — the frame gives a fraction longer at contact, so the ball sits in the stringbed instead of skidding off it, and the stability holds up when somebody hits through you.

The Super Grommets use a figure-eight geometry that lets the mains slide and snap back for spin, the REVA handle system and VTEX butt cap take a bite out of what reaches your hand, and it comes wrapped in Volkl's VSENSE grip.

It is a low-to-medium power frame with a medium-to-full stroke requirement, which in plain language means it gives you nothing you did not swing for and takes nothing away either.

You will get use out of this everywhere from a windy municipal court beside the Adda to an indoor hall down the valley in Sondrio, and by the way, it is exactly the right racquet for a Valtellina evening — the kind that finishes with pizzoccheri, a plate of bresaola and a glass of Sassella, and somebody insisting on one more set first.

The 16×18 pattern gives you the spin window to hit heavy at the end of a long day; the mass gives you depth without swinging harder.

One straight warning, because a serious player deserves one. 315 grams unstrung is real weight and the sub-320 swingweight does not repeal physics — it just moves the effort earlier in the swing. Coming off a 290 gram frame, give it two weeks before you judge the second serve.

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