 So last week I received a really cool message from Fabio at Functional Tennis and he asked me if I'd like to review one of his products. So this week he's sent it over and I have received one of these bad boys. So today I'm going to unbox it and hopefully take it out on core and let you all know what I think of it. Let's have a look. So here it is. You may have already seen these online. It was a product that went viral about a year ago and it's sold at Functional Tennis and it is called the Tennis Pointer. It's basically a wooden spoon used as a tennis racket and here it is. A note here as well. Thank you for joining the Functional Tennis family, Fabio. Did you know we have a podcast? Yes I did. Fantastic podcast, definitely worth a listen. It says search for Functional Tennis in your favorite podcast app. Yeah lots of good podcasts from coaches, tennis players, other people in the tennis industry, in the tennis world. So go check it out. But yeah here is the product. So it's a big wooden spoon and the idea of it is to help you to improve your positioning, improve your timing and for you to be able to hit the sweet spot more often. Rather than having a big racket head like you normally would on a traditional tennis racket, this paddle part here is where you're going to hit the ball. And if you look at the length of this tennis pointer, it's 23 inches so that this is positioned where your usual sweet spot would be on a 27 inch adult racket. There's three models, there's a junior model, there's a mid model which is this one and there is a pro model which is slightly heavier. So it's pretty, it's pretty sturdy. It's made of oak. It weighs 308 grams with a swing weight of 272 grams and its balance point is 33 centimeters. The nice thing about it is it's got a real tennis grip. I've seen these products in the past you know people have made them at home and they've basically just been a stick of wood or a big wooden spoon but this has a tennis grip on it. You can see here it's got eight bevels so that you can hit you know your normal forehands, backhand serves with the correct grip. It's a grip size two I believe. Obviously you can build it up if you want to by putting another over grip on top of it. But yeah, initial thought is going to be fun to play with. It's sturdy. I can feel already that it's got a good weight to it. It feels similar to the sort of weight I play with the 310 gram racket I play with the Head Speed Pro. So it'd be interesting to see how this feels when I go out and play with it. But yeah let's see what it's like on the tennis court. So it's actually been three weeks since I unboxed the tennis pointer. I've been gagging to play with it. However we've been locked down and unable to get onto the tennis course in England. So today is my first day back on court. I've had a couple of coaching sessions this morning and already I've tested this out with one of my junior players. It was his first time back on court in a month and so we were warming up in the boxes and he was hitting the frame quite severe and mistiming his shots with his racket. So I thought it'd be a good opportunity to test this out. I got him hitting with it for one minute. I was hand feeding him just some poor hands and he was watching the ball and trying to make contact with it. He missed the first few, shanked a couple and eventually you know 30 seconds in he started to make a good connection with the ball with the pointer. After a minute we've got him using his tennis racket and it was an unbelievable difference with his timing. Everything he was connecting with clean on the middle of the strings playing so much better. So just using it for one minute can really impact how much you watch the ball and your timing and your positioning. I'm already really impressed with this with my instant results I've seen with the junior so far. Now I've brought my tennis racket along with me and as you can see when you line up the grips the tennis pointer, the paddle part or the head is right where the sweet spot would be on an adult sized racket and 27 inch racket. So if I can hit the ball with this going back to this is going to be a doddle. Let's take a look see if I can play with it. It's been quite a lot of shots. Quite a lot of my ground strokes were kind of hitting near the edge of the paddle showing that if I was hitting with a tennis racket I'd probably get away with it but it's not going to be quite as clean as if I could hit the sweet spot. It felt stable, it felt good when you made a good connection with it and obviously it felt horrible when you misconnected. It really made me focus on watching the ball moving my feet well and getting my spacing right which is exactly what it's designed for. As expected you're not able to hit any types of spin with it you know if you try to hit topspin or slice it's near impossible purely because when you hit a topspin or a slice with a tennis racket you're actually using more of the racket face with the ball brushing up on those strings and actually it's the strings that allow you to generate that spin with creating friction on the string bed. Having a wooden paddle it doesn't allow you to get that spin. I played with it for a good 15-20 minutes and it was physically difficult. My suggestion would be to use it within your warm-up routine you know it could even be just one or two minutes of hitting in the boxes with this just to sharpen up your reactions, focus you in on watching that ball and moving your feet well. A minute or two will be plenty for you to time it better when you use your tennis racket. When I did go on to use my tennis racket I found that I was hitting lots of balls long purely because I had to put quite a lot of effort in to get it over the net therefore when I went on to using my racket the ball flew so I could then introduce topspin and slice to make that margin for error slightly better. It's definitely a fantastic teaching aid or a tool to help you with your timing as long as you use it in the right ways. Don't use it for too long don't try to use it for technical changes we're not looking to develop spin it's not necessarily going to help you technically so just one to two minutes at the start of the session will help you with your timing, your positioning and watching the ball better. As a coach I'm definitely going to keep this in my bag because I think it's going to be a great tool for all abilities all of my players to use. This is the mid version so it's slightly heavy or slightly long for a junior player however I used it with an 11-year-old like I said earlier and actually the success was fantastic so as long as you're using it in the right way not overusing it I think it's going to be a fantastic tool to develop your game or if you're a coach to help your players to develop their games. Thanks again for watching if you've got any questions about the tennis pointer let me know in the comments below. Like I said at the start it's from Functional Tennis I really do think it's a great teaching aid for coaches and definitely a good thing for tennis players to have in their tennis bag for their warm-ups. If you like this video feel free to subscribe to the channel check out my other videos and hopefully I'll see you again soon. Take care.