HEAD Tour Team 25L Tennis Backpack Review: Two Frames and Your Shoes

Twenty five litres puts this in day rucksack territory, the size of bag people carry to work or to school. That is a more useful reference point than a racket count, because a racket count describes the racket compartments only and tells you nothing about where the rest of a club night goes. HEAD rates the Tour Team for two rackets and gives trainers their own pocket, and the 25 litre figure is the part that decides whether everything else fits around them.

What 25 litres gets you

A 25 litre pack is not 25 litres of free space once two frames and a pair of court shoes are in it. Work backwards instead: rackets and shoes first, then a shirt, a towel, a tube of shuttles, a spare grip and a bottle. That is a normal club night, and 25 litres is the sort of capacity that suits it. It is not a weekend bag.

HEAD rates the bag for two rackets, so that is not the question. The one worth asking is whether it still shuts comfortably with the shoes in, and a dedicated shoe pocket means those two things are not competing for the same space.

Tennis on the label, badminton in the bag

HEAD sells the Tour Team as a tennis backpack, and for a badminton player that is not a problem. Law 4.1 of the Laws of Badminton caps a racket frame at 680mm in overall length. A standard adult tennis racket is 27 inches, which is 685.8mm. A bag built around tennis frames is therefore the more accommodating of the two on length.

That is not a guarantee of fit, because the compartment's own dimensions are not published. It does mean the sport printed on the label is no reason to rule the bag out, and if you play both, or the bag gets shared at home, tennis sizing is the safer way round.

Shoes in their own pocket

The separate shoe pocket is the feature doing the most work here. Court shoes come off a sports hall floor damp and dusty, and keeping them off a clean shirt is worth more than an extra few litres of capacity. It also means the bag packs in one go, with no hunting for a carrier bag on the way out of the door.

The specification does not give the pocket's dimensions, so if you take a large size, that is the one thing worth checking when it arrives rather than assuming.

Padded straps and a full bag

The straps are padded, which is the least you want on a pack this size. What you load matters more than the padding does: two badminton rackets come to roughly 200g together, while shoes, a full bottle and a change of clothes stack up fast, and a 25 litre bag filled to the top carries very differently from a half empty one. If you walk, cycle or get the bus to play, a two strap backpack is the right format for that trip, and this is squarely that format.

Green or Black, and the thirty pence gap

The listing name says Black, but it is sold in two colourways at slightly different prices: Green at £58.00 and Black at £58.30. No difference is described beyond the colour, so pick on looks, and note that Green is the cheaper of the two by thirty pence.

What the listing leaves out

The gaps are worth stating plainly rather than filling in, and the first one is the basis for everything above: this is a read of the specification and the format, not a report from a bag carried for a season. The listing covers the 25 litre capacity, the racket compartments, the shoe storage and the padded straps. It does not give outer dimensions, the fabric, the number of small pockets, or whether there is a bottle holder. If one of those is the thing that decides it, ask us before ordering and we will try to confirm it.

Who it suits

This is a bag for the player who arrives with a couple of frames, changes at the hall and travels light: club nights, a coaching session, a league fixture where you are not carrying spares at three different tensions. Anyone already carrying six rackets, or wanting one bag to swallow a full weekend of kit, is better served by a longer holdall, and our guide to choosing a racket bag sets out where each format stops making sense.

The HEAD Tour Team 25L Tennis Backpack is £58.00 in Green and £58.30 in Black, and sits alongside the rest of the bags range at Setra Sports.