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Don Bryan restrings a tennis racket at Westgate Tennis Center on Wednesday.

Although wet courts Wednesday morning delayed play in USTA Boys 14s National Clay Court Championships, Dothan’s Don Bryan was plenty busy stringing rackets at the Westgate Tennis Center for the players in town.

“I get here at 3:30 in the morning sometimes and I’m stringing until, golly, 10 o’clock (at night),” Bryan said. “You can have 16-hour days of just stringing.

“They need it that morning, so a lot of times I’d rather go home, get five hours of sleep, and come back and string instead of trying to push through. Once you hit that wall, it’s difficult. But once you get refreshed, I’m so much quicker.”

The approximately 200 players ages 13 and 14 in Dothan from throughout the country bring multiple tennis rackets and will normally need one of their rackets strung several times during the week-long event.

“Probably about every three days,” Bryan said of the player’s needs. “Some of them are not necessarily string breakers, but the string loses its playability, so what they want to do is come in and get some fresh strings.

“It’s sort of like a rubber band. An old rubber band might do the job, but a new one does it so much better.”

Bryan, who retired as the manager of the Westgate Tennis Center in 2016 after 16 years, learned the craft of stringing rackets 31 years ago and was certified as a master racket technician in 1993.

“Mike Watson from Ozark taught me,” Bryan said. “He’s the one that got me into tennis. He explained one little thing to me and he said, ‘It’s up to you, go ahead’ and I just learned. The first racket took me an hour and 45 minutes.”

Now it only takes Bryan about 20 minutes to string a racket with the aid of a machine he purchased in 2001.

“I’ve made some mistakes along the way … you have to restring a racket, which is very hard to do because you get aggravated with yourself,” Bryan said. “I’ve got my technique down, so knock on wood I don’t get many complaints.”

As Bryan worked on a racket Wednesday, there were a handful of others lined up behind him.

“One boy came in and I strung six rackets for him,” Bryan said. “Another boy I’ve strung at least one racket about every two days.”

Bryan explains that with the force the players of this caliber swing the racket, it is necessary to restring them quite often.

“They may play a two-and-a-half hour match and then they are going to go out and hit another hour or hour-and-a-half, so there is a lot of stress on their rackets,” Bryan said. “If you have a problem with your clothing, your tennis shoe … you have reasonable time to fix that.

“If you break a string, you have to keep going. They’ll give you time to go to your bag and get another racket, but they don’t give you reasonable time to go find another racket. If you don’t have another racket, you’re still on the clock and you can actually be defaulted for not having a racket.”

Bryan said serious junior tennis players know exactly what they want as far as what kind of string to use and how tight they want it strung when they hand their racket over to Bryan.

“It depends on how fast you swing, the size of your racket, how strong you are and how hard you hit … that kind of thing,” Bryan said. “They’ve worked it out with their coach over time, so they let you know what they want.

“Ninety-nine percent of the people bring their own string, which is what we prefer, and they already know what the tension is.”

While Bryan is a common face at tournaments at the WTC, he also strings many rackets for local recreation players of all ages.

“They will usually call the tennis center and they will give them my number and we get to talking and I get some information from them … you know, how fast do you swing, what type of racket are you using, what’s your experience level?” Bryan said.

“If they don’t have a clue of what they want, I string it and I tell them if this isn’t exactly what you want, come back to me and we’ll talk about it and then we’ll have a starting point and we can go from there.

“I’ll keep in contact and I keep records of every person that I string for locally. I know the last time they had the racket strung, what we strung it at, what racket they were using and if there was any special instructions type thing … I put that down. So when they come in the next time, if they want to make a change, that’s great. We know we have this, so we can work off that.”

It was suggested Bryan can be considered a doctor of stringing.

“I haven’t cured anything yet,” Bryan said with a chuckle. “Well, I guess I have … I’ve cured some tennis elbows. I guess you’re right. I’m going to stand a little taller now … the stringing doctor.

“I need to put that on my business card. You’ve given me an idea there,” he added with a laugh.

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Don Bryan restrings a tennis racket at Westgate Tennis Center on Wednesday.

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