INDIAN WELLS, Calif. -- The WTA Finals injury report tends to make for grim reading by November, a catalog of sore backs, tired legs and the occasional cramp that arrives in the middle of the night. Most of it belongs to the players who have earned it. A few entries belong to those who never hit a ball and have been quietly accumulating their own symptoms.

One of those cases is more than 40 years in the making, and the man it belongs to reports for duty at 7:30 in the morning with about a dozen orders to fill before the first point of the day. Will Devine, one of three stringers working the Finals in Indian Wells, figures he has strung more than 100,000 racquets in his career. “Everybody thinks it’s the hands,” he said. “But it’s mostly just standing.”

Such complaints are, in this line of work, considered a minor occupational hazard, and so far none of the three stringers at this year’s FAGE WTA Finals has seen fit to call in sick.

Devine, Dustin Tankersley and Cole Tonge are here with Wilson, the tournament’s official racquet stringer, serving as the Finals’ resident authorities on what a single pound of tension can do to a racquet. Their job is to send each one back feeling exactly the way its owner expects, which takes a surprising amount of strategy, a feel for what each player wants and an appreciation for why five spare racquets might not be enough.

A head start on the morning shift

Before the first ball is struck, each stringer can begin the day with 10 to 12 racquets on the list, most of them due by late morning. Some players want their racquets strung that same morning, which sounds like a scheduling problem until you learn about the loophole. The night before, Devine and his teammates will measure and cut the string and thread the mains, the strings that run lengthwise down the racquet, and leave the pulling for daylight.

“We just plop it on and start tensioning,” Devine said.

But, of course, there’s only so much a head start can buy you when the orders keep coming in.

By the standards of the profession, the Finals are an intimate affair. At a Grand Slam, Devine said, a crew of 22 to 24 stringers can work through more than 600 racquets on a busy day in the early rounds. The total at the last US Open came in just over 8,000, a figure that sounds less like a workload than a modest manufacturing operation. Devine estimates he personally handles 25 to 35 a day at a major, depending on his assignments, and once the draw thins after the second round, the stringers thin with it, an attrition that is at least more orderly than the one on court.

Here, the three of them got the call for this year's WTA Finals, and they’ll work with the same small field through the last match. They’ve strung for some of these players at other tournaments, so they already have a sense of what each player likes when the first racquets come in.

A bag full of options  

Heading into Day 4 at the WTA Finals, the crew had strung 62 racquets for Aryna Sabalenka, more than twice as many as anyone else in the field. Tankersley checked the tally. Coco Gauff was next at 29, followed by Jessica Pegula at 20.

Tankersley said Sabalenka usually has a stringer who travels with her and typically goes through three to five racquets for practice alone. Ahead of her match Wednesday against Mirra Andreeva, she ordered eight, six at one tension and two a little tighter. Gauff often does something similar, with most of the racquets at one tension and a couple strung tighter or looser depending on conditions.

Sabalenka and Gauff both like to have options, but what counts as a well-stocked racquet bag varies considerably around here. Some players have two or three racquets strung for a match. Others, like Sabalenka, want more options. Ask for five at the usual tension, with one a pound looser and another a pound tighter, and you have, on the surface, a sensible hedge against a change in conditions or a ball that keeps sailing long. But even with a half dozen perfectly serviceable alternatives sitting in the bag, a player can send the racquet already in use back mid-match for a change in tension.

“Sometimes they have a favorite that they like,” Devine said. It’s the tennis equivalent of owning a closet full of coats and wearing the same one all winter.

Gabriela Dabrowski and Luisa Stefani share a side of the court, but their bags are packed a little differently. Dabrowski brings three racquets, usually has one freshly strung and wants all three to feel as much alike as possible. Stefani brings four and might have all four done on a match day. She usually drops off her own racquets on the way through, while Dabrowski now generally leaves it to her coach.

Some players make it through a whole tournament on a single string job. A few, Devine said, may go the entire week without sending one in for a tune-up. Most come back regularly, though, and plenty of strings get cut out while they’re still intact. Polyester strings, made from a single solid strand of synthetic material, gained popularity in the late 1990s for their durability, spin and control. They generally play firmer than natural or synthetic gut, but as they lose tension, a player can notice the ball coming off the racquet differently long before a string snaps. The strings get an early retirement, and Devine and crew pick up another job.

Rounder, stretched and other special requests

It turns out this service includes some sculpting. Some players ask for the racquet head itself to come back rounder or a little more elongated, which is quite a request to add to an order for fresh strings. Tankersley said the crew can accommodate that, too.

The shaping starts with how the stringer mounts the frame. A softer, more flexible racquet can change shape under tension, and how firmly the machine holds it can alter the result. One player here, Tankersley said, asked the crew to leave the center post a little looser so the head would come out rounder. A doubles player asked for 88 pounds of tension, he said, about as tight as the machine will go.

The conditions can change the order, too. The crew has worked the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells, where the temperature can fall 30 degrees from day to night. A few swings after sundown can be enough for a player to rethink the setup that worked that afternoon.

With that much experience in the room, it seems reasonable to assume a stringer could diagnose the problem from the stands and get a head start on the next job. Devine said he can sometimes pick up on a change in how the ball comes off the strings, especially when he’s on court with the player. As a rule, though, he’s careful not to overstep, leaving the player or coach to decide what they’d like to try.

For Diana Shnaider, an alternate at the Finals, that conversation usually goes through coach Sascha Bajin. She brings five racquets to a match, four at the same tension and a fifth they can set up differently. If something feels off, Bajin generally handles it with the stringer. “It’s always the coach’s fault,” Shnaider said, laughing.

A player can have a fairly detailed account of what the ball is doing and a less definite idea of what Devine should do about it. The next racquet gives them a chance to narrow the possibilities. He can take the tension up or down a pound, and the player can report back after a few swings. They’ll get there in the end, even if it takes a string job or two.

Fifteen minutes, or 12 if it's urgent

In this business, a slow moment mostly means the next racquet hasn’t arrived yet. Between the morning list, the players who fly in late and the ones who send a racquet back mid-match, the stringing room rarely stays quiet for long, and the crew works that way by design.

“We just always need to be ready,” Tankersley said. “Every day is different than the one before.”

There is a rush job at every tournament, Devine said, whether a player has flown in late or needs a racquet back while a match is still going. The usual target is about 15 minutes. If a player is waiting on court, a stringer can bring it closer to 12.

Think about it: Twelve minutes, on a typical racquet with 16 mains and 19 crosses, means threading and tensioning 35 runs of string, weaving each cross over and under the mains, and tying off the ends before the racquet can go back on court.

“It’s not so much how fast you string,” he said. “It’s how well you string fast.”

Can mistakes happen? Sure, a string can snap when a racquet is three-quarters done, something Devine said is rare. Shnaider recalled breaking a string on a freshly strung racquet in Wuhan, with a spot in the semifinals on the line, switching frames and breaking another two points later.

“Not ideal. Wrong timing,” Bajin said. 

Not every mishap works against the player. In Doha, Dabrowski once asked for a racquet to be strung 54 pounds before a doubles match with Jelena Ostapenko, but the numbers got reversed and she played at 45. The racquet felt loose to her, though she was hitting well and the two of them won. She didn’t find out until that evening, when the stringer checked her previous order and came to ask which number she had meant.

“It honestly inspired me to go down in tension,” Dabrowski said.

Few episodes end that well, and the stringers would just as soon not rely on luck. After decades of studying frames, Devine and his colleagues know the quirks of a racquet well enough that surprises are rare.

“We always say it’s not a mistake unless it leaves the room,” he said. “If you catch it, fix it, you’re good.”

Good enough to earn a fresh dozen racquets at 7:30 the next morning.