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 Marilyn Crandall restrings a Wilson N6 racquet on her floor restringing machine. Jeremy Castillo/Argonaut
This is a normal scene in the Crandall house ever since Marilyn started Re-Strung, her own tennis racquet restringing business.
Crandall’s venture into entrepreneurship was almost out of necessity.
She was sending her racquet to a friend’s pro shop in Portland, Ore.
because the only business that does restrings in Moscow — Sport Town —
takes two months.
Eventually, Crandall decided to learn the trade herself. Her friend
Lance, owner of the pro shop, gave her lessons on how to string tennis
racquets. After a couple lessons, she started getting the hang of it.
"I made three racquets with mistakes," she said. "Then I started cranking them out."
Crandall is still learning and perfecting the skill though. She said it
takes her an hour for one restring, whereas an experienced person takes
less than a half hour.
"I still double check every racquet 87 times," Crandall said. "I'm
still pretty meticulous. I'm pulling out strings and checking the
racquet."
Luckily, restringing isn't as brutal on the fingers as she expected.
"I was really surprised ... I thought it would beat up my hands but it didn't," Crandall said. "Then again, I'm not in a race."
Crandall starts by loading the racquet into her floor model restringer. After it's secure, she starts stringing the mains at the racquet's center. Once finished, she attacks the crosses, using an over-under technique.
Her attention to detail on every restring is important. A tennis racquet has two types of strings. Mains run up and down; crosses run left to right. One miss in the weave and she'll have to start that part over.
After the strings are in place, Crandall creates and tightens a knot with the restringer, which guarantees the right tension: 63 PSI. Crandall says string tension is essential maintenance.
She always tells students in her private tennis lessons to "treat themselves to a string job" after their racquet's been in storage for long periods.
"You want the racquet to have life," she said. "If you store it in a trunk over the summer, the heat makes you lose tension and it feels like you're playing with a lacrosse basket."
Under use and lost tension isn't the only reason to give your racquet, in Crandall's words, a string job.
"Some people are just chronic string breakers," she said. "High school boys are a classic example."
And Crandall would know. She's also the junior varsity tennis coach at Moscow High School. Before that, she coached at Grant High School in Portland. Crandall doesn't see any noteworthy difference between the two teams.
"High school tennis is high school tennis," she said.
It's odd to think someone so immersed in one sport started out playing something different.
"When I started college in 1969, I was a basketball player," Crandall said. "But I started hanging out with guys who played tennis."
She has several other tennis jobs on her resume. After playing for two years at the University of Washington and graduating with a botany degree, she coached men's tennis at Lower Columbia Community College and was recently director of tennis for Portland Parks and Recreation.
But now she's in Moscow, introducing a new generation of young players to the world of tennis. The change in scenery from Portland to the Palouse may have been drastic but Crandall is doing well.
"They were building houses on top of houses in Portland when we left," Crandall said. She then pointed outside her sliding door window, which frames a section of Moscow's rolling hills. "It's green here during the summer time, yellow in fall, and white in winter. It's beautiful."
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