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Title: The Last Tennis Ball Factory in the West
Role: Photographer / Writer
The article is researched, written and photographed by me. Read the full article below.
“If you get to the B&B, you’ve gone too far.”
I reverse and try again. The sheep in an adjacent field baa in amusement.
Finally, I find myself at a lone standing industrial unit and meet Louise Price, who represents the third generation of her family to run the business. Entering her office, we are surrounded by a multitude of tennis balls in a myriad of colours, sporting various brandings. This rubber factory is also, in fact, the last remaining tennis-ball factory in the Western world.
Louise’s grandfather, Joseph Price, a rubber technologist, came to Box in 1936 and, after a brief stint as an employee at the plant, took over the business, bringing on his 16–year-old son, Derek, to work with him in 1947.
They thrived in the tennis-ball-making sector and produced, as they still do today, all manner of other rubber products, from modest wheelbarrow wheels to precision engine mounts used in Royal Navy ships. Today, Louise runs the operation, though her father, Derek, now 93, is still integral to the business and can be found on the factory floor or at his desk every day, happily working a 55-plus-hour week.
Growing carefully has meant thinking outside the box, and Louise has identified markets for tennis balls that have little do with tennis itself. “I spent years trying to work out how we could have a ‘volume ball’ to compete with Asian pricing, and the simple answer is: You can't. So we had to do something different, whether that's bespoke labelling and branding, bespoke colour, or a bespoke ball altogether.” In addition to its ITF (International Tennis Federation) approved competition balls, Price makes balls specifically for pets, as novelty and promotional items, and even to float on the surface of reservoirs, slowing down evaporation by providing shade. Price produced in excess of 700,000 balls last year and have their sights on breaking the 1 million mark in the next couple of years.
As we step out from the office and onto the 15,000-foot factory floor, I spot Derek, away from the main action, working on a machine by himself. “He’s installing a timer control panel for a press that will mould squash balls,” Louise explains loudly, battling the noise of industrial machinery. In fact, Price produces a number of performance rubber balls - tennis and squash balls being the most common, but also balls for niche games like Frontenis, Eton Fives and Lawn Skittles.
Innovation in rubber is something that comes naturally to the Prices. The material must run through their veins. As I catch up with Derek, I ask him how he became an engineer. “Well, I went to a technical school, I suppose,” he humbly responds, not wanting to identify himself as a fully trained engineer, as if it were a title he was unworthy of. In reality, Derek’s effect on global tennis can only be described as seismic.
In the ’90s, the national British tennis association, the LTA (Lawn Tennis Association), was battling with a decline in tennis playing among children and decided to make a push to promote mini tennis, an accessible version of the game developed for children.To do so, it needed a ball that was suitable for children and for outdoor use. (The then-current offerings were made from foam and didn’t stand up to the rigors of the outdoors.) A meeting was called with the world’s leading ball manufacturers, at which they were invited to create a ball they thought would be of the right size, weight and compression for youngsters to use, but upon deciding that the venture would not be commercially profitable, the manufacturers all dropped out. All apart from one quietly eccentric man from Bath - Derek Price.
Dunlop, Slazenger, Price: These British companies were once among the leading tennis-ball manufacturers in the world. However, when manufacturing in South East Asia took off in the 1990s, production of tennis balls in the UK all but ceased, with British firms unable to keep up with the drastically lower costs of manufacturing abroad. Price weathered the storm but saw its workforce shrink significantly - from 150, to 80, to 25 and finally to just seven staff members.
“The stoic nature of Dad managed to save the business by growing in other areas. Dad’s a problem solver, and his problem had become a lack of sales, so when the internet came around, he taught himself to build websites and sell directly to consumers and businesses. We simply couldn’t afford to go through distributors any more. We are back up to 13 staff now and our focus is on growing carefully,” Louise explains, with a sure air of positivity.
The factory is a harsh environment, raucous with the sounds of whirring heavy machinery and the hissing of steam-releasing valves. Carbon-black stains from the raw rubber materials leave their mark on anything they touch, and glue is splattered over containers as felt-coated materials are left out to dry. The reality of tennis-ball manufacturing is that it’s messy, quite in contrast to the finished product, those pristine glowing spheres that emerge after ripping open a new tube.
It's impossible to witness this arduous process without being struck by the wastefulness of it: The use each tennis ball gets on court (on average, 3-6 hours to the average club player in the UK) pales in comparison to the effort that has gone into making it. This is a problem that Louise recognises and has decided to tackle. Price is leading the way in sustainable tennis ball manufacturing and is the first and only manufacturer in the world to have created a 100% recycled tennis ball. To boot, that ball is approved for use at the highest levels of competition by the ITF. “Every single ball we now make contains some recycled element, and my mission over the next decade is to focus on making our whole range 100% recycled. We’ve built the facility to recycle any part of a tennis ball, from the felt to the rubber, even down to the tube, its lid and metal rim.”
“They wanted a red ball but I said, ‘No, kids won’t like that. Two colours. Red and yellow will be a good combination.”
And so, after seven different iterations of development, a 75mm, lightweight, low compression red-and-yellow ball was agreed upon and deployed with great success in clubs and schools across the UK. Now, almost 25 years on, the ball has been adopted as a global standard, and as anyone who has had experience with kids’ or beginners’ tennis will tell you, that ball is a game-changer. To think how many kids have taken up tennis or persisted at the sport due to this ball is staggering.
Leaving the factory, I feel a sense of warmth and familiarity. I have the sense that I’ve made some sort of ancestral discovery or distant family reconnection. I suppose when you grow up playing tennis and it’s a constant throughout your life, it’s places like Price of Bath that make you realize what you’re a product of.