Tennis Balls Made in USA (What Happened To Them?)

Tennis is a very popular sport. It is easy to play but very difficult to master. But whether you are an amateur or a professional, you will still go through a lot of tennis balls during your tennis matches. So, in this article, I’ll be looking to see what has happened to the American tennis ball companies. Is it still possible to find any tennis balls made in the USA?

Are There Any Companies That Produce American Made Tennis Balls? (The Short Answer)

It doesn’t seem like it anymore. I looked high and low but couldn’t find any companies that still make tennis balls in the USA.

Tennis Balls that Are Commonly Mistaken as Being American Made

I did quite a bit of digging to try and find tennis balls that are made in America, but came up short and didn’t find even one solid option. There are several companies that many people wrongly think produce tennis balls in the US, and I thought it’d be useful to highlight those here so you don’t go ahead and buy something incorrectly.

Penn

Penn is America’s best-selling tennis ball company, and up until 2009, it produced all of its tennis balls at its facility in Jeanette, Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, Penn moved its production to China in order to cut costs.

There is a fair amount of false information out there claiming that Penn still produces tennis balls in America. This false information does not come from the Penn website, it comes from various third-party websites. Whether this is just a case of the information not being updated or not is unclear.

Head

Head is Penn’s parent company. Head is also very well known for its own line of tennis balls and equipment, so it gets its own entry on this list. According to an article in the Washington Post, Head became the “last US-based tennis ball manufacturer to move production abroad.”

Head has invested $25 million in creating an enormous facility in China. Today, Head produces an estimated 100 million tennis balls for the global market each year.

Wilson

People often mistake Wilson for an American tennis ball producer. This is down to the fact that Wilson is an American-founded company. It seems like some people have mistakenly taken that to mean that the company produces its tennis balls in America.

Wilson tennis balls are actually produced in Thailand and Indonesia. The company’s headquarters, however, is based in Chicago, Illinois. This is where the confusion seems to come from.

Update:

One of our readers reached out and gave us some more information about Wilson. It turns out that Wilson was acquired by a Chinese company in 2019. So, Wilson is no longer an American owned company. You can read more details about it via this link that the reader sent to us.