Kit That Survives a Season
Most tennis clothing fails in the same four places, in the same order. Here is what to check before you buy, and what to do afterwards.
A season is roughly seventy hours of play, forty washes and one very hot fortnight in which you sweat more than in the other eleven months put together. Very little tennis clothing is designed against that number. Most of it is designed against a photograph.
Kit rarely fails dramatically. It goes in four places, in a fairly predictable order: the shoulder seam, the collar, the hem, and then the colour. If you know where to look you can tell in a shop, in about ninety seconds, whether something will make it to September.
Turn the shoulder inside out
You want a flatlock or a covered seam — a flat band of stitching rather than a raised ridge with a loose overlocked edge inside it. A serve loads that seam every time, and a season is somewhere north of four thousand serves. Ridge seams also abrade the shoulder itself. If you have ever finished a long afternoon with a red line across your collarbone from a bag strap, you already know what a seam can do given enough repetitions.
Then pull the knit gently across the grain. Cheap jersey opens up and shows white between the loops and stays slightly opened. Good jersey resists and closes again. It is a rude thing to do to a garment in a shop and it is worth doing anyway.
Weight, and the trap of lightness
Very light fabric feels like performance on a hanger. It is also the first thing to go transparent when wet and the first to lose its hem. Somewhere between 140 and 180 grams per square metre is the useful band for a warm-weather tennis shirt: heavy enough to hang off the shoulder instead of clinging to it, light enough that you forget you're wearing it by the third game. Our Men's Performance Tee ($68) and Women's Performance Shirt ($72) sit in the middle of that band, which is a deliberately unglamorous place to sit.
The exception is the layer you put on afterwards, where heavier is simply better. A sweatshirt lives in a car boot, over a fence, under a bag, on a damp bench. Look for a loopback that feels excessive and cuffs that have been ribbed rather than folded and stitched. A hemmed cuff goes slack in a season and never comes back.
The collar is where the money went
A collar is the easiest place for a manufacturer to save, because almost nobody checks it and it doesn't fail until month five. What you want is a collar knitted as its own piece and then attached — you can feel the join. What you don't want is a strip cut from the same jersey as the body and folded over. Fold-over collars curl. Once a collar has curled it does not uncurl, and no amount of ironing survives one wash.
Whites go grey from detergent, not dirt
Most clubs still ask for some version of white, and most white kit is retired grey rather than stained. The grey is detergent build-up: too much powder, not enough water, half-full drums. Use less than the box says and run the machine properly full. Sun-drying whites works, is free, and is the only laundry advice on this page that your grandmother would also have given you.
Anything dyed, dry in the shade. Sun costs a coloured garment about a shade a season, and it takes it off the shoulders first, which is exactly where you'll see it.
The wash is half the lifespan
Forty degrees, inside out, no softener. Fabric softener works by leaving a waxy film on the fibre. On a technical knit that film sits in exactly the spaces the fabric uses to move moisture, and it does not wash out. A shirt that has stopped breathing has usually just been softened forty times.
Tumble dryers do the other half of the damage. Elastane dislikes heat and gives up first at the hem and the cuff, which is why old kit goes wavy at the bottom. Hang it up. It will be dry before you've finished putting the car away.
And wash it the evening you play rather than the evening before you play next. Salt sits in a fabric and works on it the whole time it's in the bag.
What to actually own
Three shirts, one sweatshirt, two pairs of shorts, and two pairs of socks for every playing day. Three shirts is the number that allows one in the wash, one in the bag and one clean, and it is also the number at which most people stop buying more, which is the real point of it.
For children, size up once and not twice. A child playing in a tent doesn't play; they spend the hour adjusting sleeves. The Kids' Tee is $42 and they will grow out of it long before they wear it out, which is the correct way round for that particular garment to fail.
None of this is complicated and none of it is new. It's only that the checks take ninety seconds and almost nobody does them. Turn the shoulder out. Feel the collar join. Read the weight. Then put the thing in your bag and stop thinking about it, which is the entire job of good kit.