Over 40 years later, Bosworth Tennis is still customizing racquets

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Welcome to Florida Week! As the tours head southeast for the Miami Open, TENNIS.com and Baseline will feature all things Sunshine State. You’ll learn about the personalities, stories, teams and venues that have made Florida one of the tennis capitals of the world. We’ll also be reporting from the Miami Open in Key Biscayne.

As you’ll learn this week, when it comes to tennis, Florida isn’t just a state—it’s a state of mind.

The name Warren Bosworth is synonymous with expert racquet production. He was the master of customization, producing perfectly balanced frames for champions like Ken Rosewall, Martina Navratilova, Ivan Lendl, Monica Seles, Pete Sampras and many, many more.

Though Warren Bosworth passed away in 2010, his company, Bosworth Tennis, lives on, customizing frames so precisely that each one in your bag is exactly identical. They can also help you select a frame from scratch that is best suited to you, no matter what your age, level or game style. It’s the level of customization expected in today’s modern world, but it started in the 1970s.

After decades of testing, feedback and design work, Bosworth even created an original frame, the Bosworth Tennis Tour 96 (which Navratilova began playing with late in her career.)

Based in a warehouse in Boca Raton, Bosworth began producing artistically crafted frames in 1972. He became so well-trusted in the tennis world that in 1981, he was called on by Lendl to ship a set of emergency customized racquets to Germany in the midst of the Czech’s 44-match winning streak.

Bosworth’s son, 55-year-old Jay, would enter the business in 1982, and he has since taken over as CEO of the family-run company.

But the Bosworth legend is more than just a perfectly weighed racquet; it’s a life dedicated to learning, a detail-driven way of approaching the game and a system of making players infinitely better by adjusting the most important tool in their arsenal.

Both Bosworths naturally dipped their toes into coaching. Warren Bosworth once worked with Brian Gottfried, a former world No. 3, and Jay Bosworth has been working with Kevin Anderson for the past four years.

“For me, because of the way my dad built the business, I'm able to do something that I really love to do,” Jay Bosworth said. “I’m not trying to grow the business. I’m not trying to make a lot of money. I'm getting to do what I love to do, and coaching is part of it.”

The main function of Bosworth Tennis is building fine-tuned racquets, with stringing being a small part of it. But the overarching mission has evolved over the years.

“The biggest difference is our synthesizing of what the player needs from a coach’s perspective with the racquet side,” Jay Bosworth said. “It started off as separate. My dad was the racquet guy. Now we've done enough and built up experience on the coaching side to be able to assist our teams on non-racquet stuff.”

Understandably, Jay Bosworth likes working with players who are flexible and open-minded, and who won’t fight the process, especially since he’s likely to make unconventional changes based on science—not on the marketing hoopla that surrounds the sport. Working with players, especially pros, is far from simple thanks to all of the different personalities, varied influences and stubborn habits.

Jay Bosworth began working with Lauren Davis in December, just weeks before her career took off with her first title in Auckland. She allowed him to make the changes he thought would work best, like making her frame heavier despite the notion that women should opt for lighter choices. Davis was great to work with, but it’s not always so easy.

"Tennis players are notorious for comfort zones,” Jay Bosworth said. “They have things they like to work on. They have things they want to do. They have things that they want to blame everything on. My dad was really good at this—this is why he was successful—he was really good at telling people what they needed to know, not what they wanted to know. Hopefully I've carried that on."

Jay Bosworth is carrying on the legacy his father built, in his own way of course, but with some lasting similarities. Like his father, Jay explains his points using analogies, patiently obsesses over the details and shares a passion for the technological and psychological particularities in tennis that most people overlook.

“He was more of a people person than me,” Jay Bosworth said. “He enjoyed the interactions and the people. He helped a bunch of people be very successful, and that's very fulfilling.”

Warren Bosworth did a lot more than just pass the business onto his son.

“I learned how to learn,” Jay said. “My dad was a learning machine. He could figure out anything, and I passed that onto my daughter. Don't give them fish; teach them how to fish. Don't teach them just how to throw it; teach them why fish go to different places. My dad was unbelievable at teaching things.”

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