Is Change Good? Federer, With New Racket, to Find Out Roger Federer using his new, bigger racket as he rolled over Blaz Kavcic at the Australian Open in Melbourne on Thursday. Saeed Khan/Agence France-Presse - Getty Images MELBOURNE, Australia - In the obsessive, superstitious, fine-tuned realm of tennis equipment, the best players hope to fiddle least with two main pieces: their shoes and their rackets. Their rackets are not dissimilar from their significant others. They are constant companions, life partners, an extension of the players themselves. There are periods of bliss and uncertainty and strife. They are nicknamed and cared for and, on occasion, cursed. Thus Roger Federer's decision to switch not only coaches but rackets this season reverberated throughout the professional tennis world, for it was radical and rare and seemed to indicate that even the great Federer now acknowledged he needed to change in order to survive. Federer long dominated tennis with a racket on which the surface area covered 90 square inches. It served as his magic wand until one year when it did not. That year was 2013, the first year that Federer did not advance to a Grand Slam final since 2002. Most elite men's players use rackets with a surface area between 98 and 100 square inches, and here Federer decided he would join them, in order to beat them once again. The process lasted roughly a year. It involved prototypes and test tournaments and a team of racket technicians that met Federer in Switzerland. No less than the remainder of Federer's career hinged on the outcome of their collective effort. "Rackets are the most important thing for a tennis player," said Darren Cahill, who played and coached and now works as an ESPN analyst. Understanding it. Knowing it. Trusting it. It's part of your family. Those stories of people putting their rackets on their bed and sleeping with them, it's what we live with. We see more of our rackets than we do of anybody else in our lives. Cahill is something of a racketologist. He collected rackets when he played, old rackets and wooden rackets, small rackets and oversized rackets, at least a "couple hundred" total. They ended up in storage when he moved from Australia to Las Vegas, but every once in a while, he liked to pull them out and hit and marvel at how the game had changed. As a coach, Cahill worked with Andre Agassi, who took the unusual step of buying rackets used by other top players and practicing with them. Agassi did this not because he wanted to switch sticks. Instead, he wanted to see how certain rackets worked and ascertain which shots his best opponents could hit easily and which shots they could not. He could essentially scout Federer by using Federer's racket in practice. Not that it helped against Federer, once the Swiss star began his historic roll. He played his first professional tournament in 1998, secured a record 17 Grand Slam singles championships and has held the No. 1 ranking longer than any other male player. He won the Australian Open singles title four times, the last in 2010, and he looked in those years the same way he did Thursday against Blaz Kavcic. With new racket in hand, Federer battered his Slovakian opponent, victory obtained easily, 6-2, 6-1, 7-6 (4), in 1 hour, 47 minutes. A reporter asked Federer about the best part of being, well, him. "Check-ins at the airport," he responded. All around the grounds, players deployed rackets roughly the size of the one that Federer had only recently switched to. Justin Gimelstob, the Tennis Channel analyst, said he witnessed the shift to larger rackets over the course of his career, which ran from the mid-1990s to 2007. "Andy Roddick was really the first one where people saw the effect of the big racket and the power," Gimelstob said. It was pretty drastic. If you watched Roddick play someone like Sampras, it looked like someone using an electric guitar against an acoustic one. Gimelstob mostly played with a 95-inch racket head. Later in his career, he noticed most players rarely changed their frame size. There were two main reasons: Most of the ATP World Tour began to use the same size rackets, and their off-season was too limited to make drastic changes as athletes do in other sports. Federer held out. He reminded Cahill of elite golfers who relied only on the blades of clubs, who struck the ball in the sweet spot almost every time they swung. There was artistry involved, something poetic about a shot struck cleanly, but that artistry left little room for error. Tony Godsick, Federer's agent, said Federer asked Wilson more than a year ago to start on a larger prototype that suited his needs more. A team of technicians flew to Zurich. Federer would hit in the morning and offer feedback. They would tinker with the rackets back at their hotel rooms and return, and he would hit again in the afternoon. That was the first stage. Federer tried the larger racket last summer, but it did it not feel perfect, which meant it did not feel right. He went back to the smaller frame for the United States Open and fell in the fourth round. The technicians continued to make changes. They ended up with two prototypes. Federer practiced with both last month and picked one to start this season. Wilson, Godsick said, made 12 of that model to start with. Six ended up at his house near Cleveland, and he transported them here via Los Angeles and Sydney. He showed a picture Thursday of the rackets at baggage claim, his precious carry-on luggage, which he stored mostly in nearby empty seats. "Look, it's a big step," Godsick said of the change. But it's good, because it shows he's going to stick around a while longer. The change also highlighted Federer's nature, his willingness to evolve. He considered using a larger racket for years, but clung to a smaller one like Pete Sampras, who stuck with an 85-inch model but later said he regretted not having tried something bigger. It was one of his few regrets. Among the other top men's players, Andy Murray is said to use a 98-inch racket head, while Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic are said to prefer the 100-inch version. The argument for the larger rackets largely comes down to physics: bigger sweet spot, bigger margin for error. Federer, of course, is an older player. He will lose some speed and some movement and with that some precision. The theory is the larger racket will help him compensate. "I don't view it as a sign of weakness," Gimelstob said. I view at as part necessity, part reality. It's Darwinism. Adapt or fall behind. And Roger is definitely the most rational, conscious, flexible champion we've ever had. Whether Federer sticks with the new racket will be, in part, psychological. Cahill said the key will be not what shots Federer hits well but whether he understands what happened with the shots he missed. Say Federer hits three perfect forehands with the new racket, then puts the same spin on the ball and watches it sail six feet long. That, Cahill said, would "be enough to give you a sleepless night." Cahill added: "The challenge is going to be sticking through those low moments. When it's not going right, it's pretty easy to get a bit depressed and go back to what you know. It all went right on Thursday, as Federer conquered the heat wave and slid into the third round. Again, he nodded to Teddy Roosevelt and carried a big (or bigger) stick. Again, it worked, even as Federer acknowledged the adjustment was ongoing. One cannot, of course, become comfortable with a new racket overnight.