“Ready-made bats are all bad”
The myth circulates with the authority of someone who already knows how to assemble their own bat and looks down on anyone buying one from the factory. The usual formulation is blunt: any ready-made bat is inferior to any custom combination, always. Put that way, it sounds like expert judgement. Examined closely, it is a generalisation mixing something true with a good deal of prejudice, and it harms precisely the player who most needs guidance.
What is true is that a segment of ready-made bats deserves the contempt. These are the generic bats of the big-box store or the marketplace: an untraceable blade, rubbers absent from the LARC list (3.4), erratic weight, sponge that degrades before leaving the box. Buying one of those is not buying cheap; it is buying badly. But the myth does not distinguish between that rubbish and the ready-made bat from a recognised brand —Butterfly, Stiga, Joola, Cornilleau— designed as a coherent whole, with components that complement each other and a balance of speed and control calibrated for a specific user profile. Lumping the two together is the equivalent of claiming every restaurant is bad because fast food exists.
A serious mid- or high-band ready-made bat does several things well. The first is solving the problem of the combination: the manufacturer has chosen blade, rubbers and thicknesses that work together, something the beginner buying loose components for the first time rarely gets right at the first attempt. The second is offering a restrained total weight, because the manufacturer controls sponge density and assembly thickness in a way the player assembling alone cannot always anticipate. The third is price: production at scale brings the cost of the whole below the sum of components bought separately.
Where the myth is partly right is on the limitations. The rubbers on a ready-made bat are usually simplified versions of the open catalogue: less spin, less durability, less resolution at contact. The blade does its job but is rarely the same one sold loose under the same name. And when the rubbers wear out, the bat becomes a closed system that is hard to repair —section 18.6 develops that point. All of it is real, but none of it invalidates the ready-made bat: it confines it to a use and a moment. The beginner bat for a child (17.1), the bat for the recreational adult who plays once a week (17.4), the bat bought as a gift for someone starting out: in those contexts a well-chosen ready-made bat is not merely acceptable, it is the better option compared with a custom one assembled without judgement.
The myth’s error is turning a limitation into an absolute verdict. That a ready-made bat does not serve the club player training three times a week does not mean it serves nobody. And that a custom bat has more scope does not mean every custom bat is good: a beginner who assembles an outer carbon blade with two hard tensors because a forum recommended it has bought something worse than any serious sixty-euro ready-made bat, and has paid three times as much for it. A custom bat does not guarantee quality; it guarantees options. And options are only worth something when exercised with knowledge.
What marks out the informed player is not rejecting ready-made bats as a matter of principle, but knowing when one fits and when it does not. If the player is starting out and has no point of comparison, a mid-band ready-made bat from a recognised brand is a sensible entry. Once the player trains regularly and starts needing adjustments —more speed on the forehand, less weight, a different rubber on the backhand— the ready-made bat stops serving and the custom one takes over. Moving from one to the other is not the correction of an initial mistake but a natural progression the game itself calls for. The decision trees in 18.7 formalise that path; this section only dismantles the idea that the first step is always the wrong one.