Tennis players are athletes on the court—and logistics geniuses when it comes to packing

Week after week, professional tennis players travel from city to city, country to country—even continent to continent. They spend hours at airports and have experienced, or at least seen, it all.

They are nomadic, but they don't travel alone. There's also their luggage, which often includes items that make airport staff frown: racquests, massage tables or even bags full of dirty laundry.

Rackets are probably the most common item in a player's luggage. Sometimes, over social media, we've seen them arriving at their destination damaged or completely destroyed. How do the pros handle travelling with their sacred equipment?

"I usually take my rackets with me on board," explained Argentine Sebastian Baez to Tennis Channel DE at the Hamburg Open. When he talks about it, it sounds like no big deal.

But Jan-Lennard Struff prefers to travel light.

"I always check in my rackets at the moment. I prefer to just take a rucksack, and don't like lugging a tennis bag around with me."

In the past, Struff toted his frames on the plane: "They usually fit in the overhead compartments, but of course they take up a lot of space—especially when it's full."

But he found out the possible perils the hard way, on one particular trip to Australia:

When the plane is particularly full, you have to hand in your racquets before boarding. I don't want to name names, but it happened to me on one airline that they took my racquets after security when we were flying to Australia. I then had to walk around with an officer and didn't know where I was going!

This moment seems to have been so formative for the 35-year-old that he decided to do things differently:

"Now I prefer to hand in my racquets, it's more comfortable," he laughs.

Of course, this carries its own risk: "If the bag doesn't arrive, you're a bit stuck, or if something gets broken. Everything has always arrived intact for me.

"Maybe it will happen next time because we've just talked about it."

Sebastian Baez and the lost massage table

The 24-year-old and his team were less fortunate on their flight from Bordeaux, where he had played a Challenger tournament, to Hamburg.

"We had a massage table with us that didn't arrive in Hamburg," he says, "So we waited at the airport. There they told us that it was in Barcelona."

The massage table wasn't really much use to him nearly 1,000 miles away. But how did it end up in Spain in the first place?

"We had a stopover there," explained Baez. "It was supposed to arrive at the hotel at 12 noon the next day. At some point it was five or six in the evening and it still hadn't arrived. So we drove back to the airport. It finally arrived at the hotel at seven in the evening."

To his credit, Baez took it all in stride, knowing that it could easily happen again.

"I have thousands of stories like that," he says with a laugh.

Keeping on top of the laundry

Struff has another story for us. Recalling his interview at the Tennis Channel desk in Madrid, presenter Prakash Amritraj admired the serve-and-volleyer's strong arms, perfectly showcased in his tank top. But that wasn't Struffi's intention at all. He confessed, somewhat embarrassed: "Actually, all my other T-shirts are in the laundry."

In this case, Struff was lucky, because the T-shirts came back freshly washed in time for his next match.

We can't take that many things with us in our suitcases. So you have to weigh things up when you're going to be away for three to four weeks. How much do I take with me? Do I take a second bag? Do I take excess baggage? How much everyday stuff? Just tennis gear?

That's why the tournament laundry service is an essential for the players. They can drop everything off and get it back later, freshly washed.

But Struffi laughs: "Of course, you never know how things will come back. Were they washed at too high a temperature? Were whites and blacks washed together? Have they been discoloured? At larger tournaments, you sometimes find other people's laundry in your bag or lose a few items yourself."

Nevertheless, he describes this service as a luxury.

It also pays to keep an eye on the time: "If you miss the return times, you might not get your things back for a day and a half. That happened to me in Madrid and Estoril," he said.

But his physio saved the day by bringing his laundry to Rome.

Struff himself has also been a laundry courier: "It just happens. Then I took things for other players or a few colleagues took things for me."