Aryna Sabalenka showing off the new Wilson Blade v10 tennis racket.

Wilson

The most-played tennis racket on the professional tour, the 20-year-old Wilson Blade, debuts a pop of an update with the April 15 release of the Blade v10, adding a “salting of power” to the control-driven frame to keep up with current needs.

“In the Blade v10 we knew we needed to turn up the power just a little bit,” David Packowitz, Wilson global product manager for performance tennis, tells me. “It is not becoming a power racket, but we turn up the power—we call it a pop—to bring it back into balance for the modern tournament player.”

During design, discussions with players surfaced the concept that certain shots—what Packowitz calls high-speed moments, such as a return of serve, a first volley or a heavy baseline exchange—required a bit more help in turning defense back into neutral or offense. While the Blade franchise has always focused on control, the sport has evolved and Wilson needed to make changes that fell in line with the needs of the players, even while retaining the core benefits of stability, feel and control.

To start, the Blade v10 features a new TurboTaper beam design. Wilson increased the beam height in the hoop by a single millimeter. “You can’t see it, it’s invisible to the naked eye,” Packowitz says. “That small adjustment in the hoop—it goes back down to the original height in the shaft—gives players that extra pop, a little salting of power, to be more aggressive to attack in more positions.”

While tapered beam technology isn’t uncommon across the Wilson line, this is the first introduction of it in a Blade.

Wilson tweaked the franchise’s StableFeel+ technology, designed to provide torsional stability and resist twisting when hitting off-center. Packowitz says Wilson dialed up another degree in the technology for more stability, giving players a better chance to get back into a point on an off-center hit, especially in those high-speed situations. “Blade players talk about playing out of the corners, catching a deep ball,” Packowitz says, adding this change helps players in those situations. “It is just an enhanced version and still very much a best-in-class control racket.”

Across the 10 generations of the frame—covering 20 years—Wilson has focused on offering an improved racket every time for the tournament player. The process of design has never changed, working with top-level athletes to bring ideas to the research and development team and then undergoing rigorous playtests with the players, seeing if the R&D concepts speak to the players.

As the most-used racket on tour—four of the current top 10 in the women’s game use the Blade—world No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka, who has used the Blade since she was 15, is one of the most recognizable while becoming a key voice in its development. “The Blade v10 gives me everything that is important for me in a racket: confidence, control and the ability to compete as aggressively as possible,” she says, adding it was “fun to test the protype version over the last few months, and I am excited to finally compete with the v10.” Of course she is, having won both Indian Wells and Miami, her first two tournaments with the new frame.

Packowitz says in the past players often didn’t want to test rackets, but the modern player is looking for even a 1% edge. “Aryna is the perfect example,” he says. “She tested the Blade v10 and immediately fell in love with it. A small change like this can help someone like her and other players in her position push through when it really matters. This will be her thing.”

The Blade v10 launches in eight models, including the flagship Blade 98 in both a 16x19 and 18x20 string pattern, a Blade 100 and a Blade 104. New this model is the Blade 100 Pro, what Packowitz calls a “unicorn of a racket.” He dubs it the “magnified version of the Blade,” with a unique spec of being 27-1/4-inches (a quarter inch longer than typical) for a more leveraged frame, with a taller beam for more pop, a 16x20 string pattern and at eight points head light. “Some of the best players in the world compete in that racket,” Packowitz says.

When it comes to specs, Wilson is continually working to tighten tolerances from the factory, saying they’ve dialed in tolerances even further on the Blade v10.

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No matter the Blade v10 of choice, they all come in a new “championship green” colorway. “When we started this project, holly molly, we made it to 10 generations,” Packowitz says. “That is a long time, and a lot of rackets don’t make it there. It was very clear we wanted to celebrate the green heritage.”

The team went through countless greens— Packowitz says “it was absurd” how many greens are in the world—but when they found this one, they knew it matched the perfect balance of being highly visible and super technical, especially when they saw it in gloss.

The racket features thin lines up the side of the frame, mirrored in the bumper, called muscle lines to represent the fibers that make a Blade. They come textured, giving players a literal touchpoint to help recenter.

The red spot on the Blade v10 hoop represents a “brand hot spot” for Wilson, something that is minimal, but still clearly defines a racket as Wilson’s. It comes in a unique position on the Blade, where the X-Loop technology—which has stood across the 10 generations—flips from being a D-beam rounded on the outside and flat on the inside on the top of the racket to flat on the outside and round on the inside toward the shaft. “The D-beam flips back on itself right where this brand hot spot is,” Packowitz says. “That is so unique to Blade and central to how Blade delivers that beautiful feel.” Now that feel comes with a fresh “salting of power” to keep Blade at the top of the tour.

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