When I was putting together my tennis ball routine for this school assembly tour, I started using Sponge Tennis Balls by Daba Magic. I like these more than the Alan Wong Sponge Tennis Balls as the Daba ones pop open much faster.
After using them for 2-3 shows a day on this tour, I found one thing that I don’t like about the Daba Sponge Tennis Balls. The white line on them is tape or something like that, where on all the other sponge tennis balls I’ve tried, they are painted on. After about a week the tape lines started getting loose, and this week they started falling off.
Here’s what the lines should look like:
And here’s what they looked like this week:
Honestly, I wasn’t surprised that this would happen to them. I didn’t think that tape was good way to make the lines. I went to the store and bought some paint and redid the lines:
It only took a few minutes to paint the lines onto the sponge tennis balls, and this should hold up for a lot longer than the tape lines.
-Louie
Hi, Louie –
Thanks for the tip on how to fix the problem with the Mr. Daba tennis balls . How have they held up since then ?
I know you were on the road when the problem arose and you had to make that fix fast to keep performing , but I’m curious if you ever contacted Mr. Daba (or the magic shop where you purchased them) regarding the issue with the tape lines falling off ? (and maybe get a refund?) Do you think you just got a bad batch or does this happen with every set of Mr. Daba tennis balls ? I mean, holy smokes, $50 for a prop you have to fix after a week or two of using it seems kind of a steep price! I suppose the advantage with the Mr. Daba tennis balls is that even if the tape falls away and you have to hand-paint the lines back on , at least you have some perfectly round (machine made) balls that are the right size and color to pass for tennis balls, so that gets you 90% of the way to having a workable prop if you paint on the lines. That beats the time and trial & error involved with having to hand-carve them from a block of sponge .
But honestly, if it was me , I would have asked for refund for having to do that type of repair work on a $50 prop after only a week of using it.
I never contacted anyone about the tape lines falling off. The fix was quick, easy and permanent. The use of tape lines is flawed, if you keep squishing the balls, there’s no way to have a long time tape line that will last.
You’re right, for me having the round green ball is basically all I need. If I was going to make my own, I’d be about $50 in material to make the mold and for foam, then there’s the labor/time.
However, I’d rather they just came with the painted lines like the Alan Wong balls…but I didn’t like the last batch of those that I got. The original run was great, the ones I got about a year later were garbage. I don’t know how they are now, because the Daba ones aside from the line issue work fine.
Louie