Back in early 2024 the ITF tightened up the beach tennis paddle rules again — the surface roughness and the overall thickness mostly. I remember Tom came in waving a printout and said our two best selling molds were now sitting right on the edge of the limit. Not over. On the edge. Which is almost worse, because a buyer's testing lab might call it either way.
So we measured everything. We have a little Mitutoyo gauge we use for the surface texture and we ran maybe forty paddles from the last three batches. About a third of them were fine. The rest were a hair too rough on the textured coat. The coat is what gives players spin, so nobody wants it too smooth, but rules are rules.
The fix was not glamorous. We had to recut the surface texture plates for two molds and dial back the grit on the topcoat spray. The Dongcheng workshop smelled like resin for about two weeks straight. I think I drank more tea that month than the whole rest of the spring.
One thing that suprised me — the thickness limit was actually easier to hit than the roughness. We just shaved the EVA core by under a millimeter and rebalanced the lead in the handle. The roughness was the real headache because it changes how the paddle plays, not just whether it passes.
We sent the first re-tooled batch to a club in Ravenna, the same people we have worked with since 2017, and asked them to just hit with it for a week and tell us if the spin felt dead. They said it was fine, maybe even a touch better off the bounce. That was the relief I needed.
Side note, completely unrelated — the new texture plates came from a supplier two streets over who also does plates for kitchen graters. The guy thought it was hilarious that we wanted them less sharp than usual. Most of his customers want more bite, not less.
If you are buying paddles to resell into Europe right now, ask whoever makes them how they handled the surface change. If they look at you blankly, that tells you something. We keep the gauge readings on file for every mold now, so when a buyer asks, Lily can just send the numbers.
