HEAD Pro Duffle Racket Bag Review: Space for the Whole Kit

A 25 litre backpack takes one racket, a pair of court shoes and not much else. Add a towel, a change of clothes and a couple of tubes of shuttles, and something ends up riding loose in the car. The HEAD Pro Duffle comes at the problem from the other end: a holdall built around volume, where the kit sets the shape and the rackets ride along inside. It costs £58.70.

The numbers first

The bag measures 50 x 30 x 28cm and the listing puts the capacity at 55 litres. Treat that second figure with care: 50 by 30 by 28 multiplies out to 42 litres of rigid box, and a soft bag bulges past its frame, so read 55 as the best case and the plain truth as a big bag rather than a precise number. Either way it holds far more than a racket backpack; HEAD's own Tour Team backpack, for comparison, lists 25 litres.

You carry it by a handle or a shoulder strap. The shell wears HEAD branding, and the bag is pitched at tennis, badminton and racket sports in general.

Where the space goes

The layout matters more than the litres. Shoes get their own section, and that is the feature to value: court soles come off a sports hall floor damp and dusty, and keeping them away from a spare shirt and a fresh grip is exactly what a kit bag should do. Clothes and accessories have their own organised spaces too, so the small stuff, grips, wristbands, tape, a bottle, is not migrating to the bottom of one shared cavity.

Packed for a club night that means shoes, a full change, a towel, a couple of tubes of shuttles, strings and grips, with room to spare. The same bag covers a weekend tournament without repacking.

The racket length question

One measurement deserves a pause before you buy. The bag is 50cm long. A full size badminton racket is about 67cm, the sport's laws cap it at 68cm, and a standard adult tennis frame is longer again. So nothing full size lies flat along the base here, and even corner to corner the quoted dimensions come up a few centimetres short. The listing still says the bag holds multiple rackets, and in a soft holdall that means the fabric gives: frames ride diagonally and tent the bag slightly past its quoted size. Expect that, rather than a neat racket bed. If you want frames lying flat in a padded, racket-shaped compartment, that is a job for a 6 racket bag or a backpack with a dedicated sleeve; our racket bag guide walks through those shapes.

The right player for it

Buy it if the whole kit travels with you: the club regular who brings shoes, a change and shuttles to every session, the tournament player living out of one bag for a weekend, the parent hauling kit for two. It suits the car boot better than the bike; a holdall hangs off one shoulder, so if you cycle or walk a long way to training a backpack still carries better. And because it is a plain HEAD holdall rather than a racket-shaped bag, it does gym duty without looking out of place.

Skip it if you travel light. One racket, a bottle and keys do not need 50 centimetres of bag, and a smaller carrier from our bags collection does that job with less bulk.

At £58.70 the Pro Duffle is a volume decision: it takes everything you bring to a match, walls the shoes off from the rest, and leaves flat racket storage to bags built for that. If your kit has outgrown your backpack, this is the shape that fixes it.