There aren’t many sports that haven’t been linked to watchmaking in some way, but tennis has an especially visible connection. For decades, big-name champions have raised trophies with very famous watches on their wrists—pieces that are superb in their own right, but rarely about the sport itself. HTD takes a different swing. Rather than simply placing a generalist watch on a player’s arm, the young Florentine brand built a design language that nods to tennis in clever, almost playful ways—without turning the watch into a costume. The result is the HTD Tennis Sport, and in the bold “Tennis Terra” configuration (my pick, in bright clay-court orange), it feels like a small, joyful manifesto: serious mechanics, thoughtfully thin casework, and a dial that winks to the scoring and surfaces that make tennis unique.
HTD is a small Italian outfit founded officially in 2020 by two Federicos—Del Guerra and Zulian—whose shared obsession with mechanics drew them from university tinkering to a proper microbrand. Their apprenticeship of sorts happened not in sterile boardrooms but between two neighboring shops: Renzo’s watch bench, where micrometric tolerances and careful hands rule, and Piero’s grease-perfumed garage, where carburetors sing and torque is a language. That dual education—precision and soul—showed up first in the Hesagraph chronographs and now carries into the Tennis Sport: an elegant, deliberately slim three-hander that keeps one foot in pure watchmaking and another on the baseline.
The Tennis Sport arrived in a compact orange presentation box that appears to match the dial color. I’m a fan of this approach: the packaging is small, tidy, and functional, with the essentials inside—paperwork and a warranty card—without unnecessary bulk. In fact, the box feels robust enough that it could plausibly double as a simple travel case. My first encounter with the watch was unexpected. It was seated in a black plastic outer ring; the top portion of that ring rotated and featured a small window that aligns with the dial markings. I couldn’t find any official note about this accessory, but it certainly presents as a purposeful protector and as the point counter for a tennis game as the rotating window corresponds to the dial markings. Once removed, the watch itself made an immediate impression: the thinness is striking. It’s been a long time since I’ve handled an automatic microbrand piece this svelte at this price point. And then there’s the dial. The orange “Tennis Terra” is, in my view, the standout of the range—vivid without being loud, contemporary yet versatile. The timing couldn’t have been better: it landed just as my long-awaited orange iPhone arrived. A small coincidence, but the color harmony makes the whole package even more satisfying.
HTD’s design eye tends toward elongated and slender steel forms, and the Tennis Sport is a refinement of that approach. On paper: 37mm in diameter, 44mm lug-to-lug, and a remarkably svelte 9mm in height including the flat sapphire crystal. On wrist, those figures translate to an easy, almost vintage-like stance; it wears compact but never small, thanks to the way the mid-case flows into downturned lugs that hug the wrist. The thin profile is the star. It gives the watch a graceful, athletic look—more nimble sprinter than gym-bulked bruiser. A detail you spot after a moment (or two): the fixed bezel has a subtle concavity. Rather than sitting as a chunky ring, it slopes inward toward the mid-case and settles perfectly flat upon it. The effect is slimming; the eye reads less mass, more glide.
HTD favours polished surfaces across the case top and flanks, which further lightens the visual footprint. It’s a technique that can go wrong if the geometry isn’t controlled—polish can make a case look puffy—but the thinness and the concave bezel keep everything taut. For all its elegance, the case specs are genuinely “sport”: a screw-down crown and screw-down caseback deliver 100 meters of water resistance. The robust sealing means you can take this watch through daily life (and even a swim) without fuss. The crown itself is small—about 5.7mm in diameter—with crisp knurling that makes it easy to grip; the petite size also has a practical upside: no digging into your wrist when you’re palming a forehand or simply typing. It’s the sort of ergonomic decision that doesn’t photograph loudly, but you appreciate every day.
HTD offers the Tennis Sport in three court-inspired colours—green “Erba,” blue “Cemento,” and the one on my wrist, orange “Tennis Terra,” echoing red-clay courts. The Terra dial is matte and richly saturated, with a texture that evokes the felt of a tennis ball. It’s not a literal pattern—no gimmicky fuzz—but a refined finish that breaks up light and gives warmth and depth. Against it, the painted markers are crisp: slim batons around the dial, doubled at twelve. The three big riffs are at three, six, and nine o’clock, where the batons give way to stylised tennis balls. Around them, printed in small caps, are the words Fifteen, Thirty, and Forty—a charming nod to the strange poetry of tennis scoring. It would have been easy to overplay this joke; HTD’s restraint keeps it clever and legible. Readability at night is solid, too: the markers carry multiple thick layers of BGW9 Super-LumiNova—about 0.4mm in total—so they glow a crisp blue while appearing clean white by day. The handset is equally considered: rounded baton hour and minute hands and a neat, needle seconds hand, all polished to catch light and provide contrast against the matte orange.
There’s an Easter egg that lives on the periphery: small “+” and “–” signs tucked between the 1 and 11 o’clock markers and the railroad minute track. Gain a point, lose a point—that eternal rhythm of the game, encoded in miniature. It’s easy to miss, which is precisely why it works; the dial rewards a second look. If you live in colourful-dial land—Rolex Oyster Perpetuals, Aqua Terras, and the many bright microbrand fielders—the Tennis Terra still feels distinct. The hue is not generic orange; it’s the deliberate, baked-earth tone of Roland-Garros clay, dialled (no pun) to a level that looks sophisticated in low light and exuberant in sun. It’s playful without being toy-like—the kind of colour that makes you smile when you check the time.
The Tennis Sport runs on the Miyota 9039, part of the Japanese maker’s premium 9-series. It’s a slim, no-date, 4Hz automatic that’s earned its reputation for reliability across countless microbrand launches. The numbers are familiar: 28,800 bph, roughly 42 hours of power reserve. In practice, many 9039s settle into single-digit daily deviations after a bit of wearing. Choosing this calibre is a design decision as much as a technical one—the 9039’s thin architecture is what lets HTD hit that 9mm total case height without floating the crystal or ballooning the mid-case. You feel the benefit every time the sleeve of a knit slides over the watch with zero snag. Mine example ran at about +7 seconds a day which is decent for such movement. There’s an intangible fit, too. The 9039 is not haute horlogerie, but it’s tough, serviceable, and efficient. On a light, agile watch themed around a sport of footwork and angles, that combination makes sense.
HTD ships the Tennis Sport on a three-link stainless bracelet that suits the watch’s scale and intent. Lug width is a versatile 20mm, tapering down to 16mm at the clasp—a proportion that visually slims the watch and increases comfort. The clasp is a thin, double-pusher deployant with four micro-adjust holes, a detail that matters far more than marketing copy would suggest. With watches this thin, even a 2–3mm sizing tweak changes how the head nestles on the wrist; micro-adjust lets you nail the fit and keep it there through seasonal changes. Links are secured with screws (thank you), and while there are no quick-release spring bars and the lugs aren’t drilled, the bracelet feels positively secure once sized—appropriate on a watch that might see the occasional knock on a court fence or a gym machine. The overall mass is low, amplified by the case’s thinness, so the watch disappears until you look for it. That’s what good daily wear feels like. If you’re a strap-swapper, the orange Terra dial is a playground. Grey or sand-toned suede will pull out the clay warmth; a natural canvas makes it read like a summers-on-tour field watch; and a matching orange rubber strap keeps the theme sporty without clashing. But the bracelet is the stock choice for a reason: it completes the clean, modern line HTD is going for.
The HTD Tennis Sport is that rare themed watch that doesn’t feel like a costume. Its references to the sport are clever and cohesive—the scoring markers, the court-surface palette, the tiny “+/–”—but they’re executed on a fundamentally strong canvas: a very thin, very wearable steel case, a legible dial with real lume, a reliable thin automatic inside, and a bracelet that fits the brief. If you’ve wished the big luxury players would lean further into tennis-specific design without shouting, HTD has quietly done it—at a size that flatters many wrists and a price that invites daily wear. In “Tennis Terra,” the watch becomes more than a colourway. It’s a mood: late-afternoon clay, chalked lines, topspin arcs, and the satisfying cadence of fifteen-thirty-forty-game. Not a novelty, not a gimmick, but a small, glowing reminder on the wrist that sport can be elegant, and elegance can still have fun.
KaminskyBlog 