Rating: 9.4/10

Adidas CrazyFlight Review

Review:

The Adidas Crazyflights are a lightweight, mobile shoe with a soft cushioned boost sole, breathable mesh shoe structure and a great outer sole grip. These aspects make for a running shoe like feel.

This shoe has a grippy outer sole designed for both wooden and Taraflex flooring, allowing the player to make powerful strides as well as smaller adjustment steps with no sliding. This creates an extremely responsive output allowing the athlete to take off with no accessory movements from sliding inside the shoe or on the court.

The soft mesh material used for the upper sections of the shoe make for a breathable and flexible feel. Its lightweight and mobile structure makes the material wrap around your foot leaving minimal space for your foot to slide within the shoe, which is important for lateral movements.

Although the soft mesh material used is extremely mobile, the heel section is reinforced with thicker and more rigid padding to provide quality heel lockdown and ankle support, making for great stability within the shoe.

The Adidas boost sole present in most of their running shoes is also placed in the Crazyflights providing an extremely comfortable, cushioned base perfect for take-off and landings when jumping. It also provides immediate responsiveness for movements in all directions. There is no doubt in my mind that this is the best sole on the market. The amount of cushioning provided really made a difference towards the end of trainings and games. This kept me feeling bouncy and agile even when fatigue would set in.

While this shoe is designed as a lightweight high performance product, I've managed to get over a year out of these shoes. Bear in mind this involves training multiple times a day 6 days a week. Where most shoes started to lose their responsiveness and cushion after 6 months, these shoes felt more and more comfortable the longer I wore them. The only issue I found was that the edge of the outer sole began to lift in the upper middle section towards the 8 month mark. Because the feel of the shoes were so good I decided to use shoe goo to mend this and continue using them.

I found the fit of this shoe was perfect for me. There was enough support, combined with a great shape allowing my forefoot space to spread under load. This shoe fits true to size but I do prefer my volleyball shoes to fit slightly tighter so I chose a 1/2 size down.

Overall, I don't think I could recommend any other volleyball shoe over the Crazyflight. Their complete design, mixed with quality manufacturing has provided an amazing volleyball shoe which I will always choose to wear.

Grip: 9

Responsiveness: 9.5

Cushion: 10

Comfort: 10

Durability: 8.5

Pros

• Amazing cushioning providing great overall comfort

• Quality grip and responsiveness

• Extremely lightweight and mobile

Cons

• Quite expensive and can be hard to find outside of Europe

My verdict: These are currently my favourite pair of shoes! I find they are great for players who need a large amount of soft cushioning for landing, as well as maximum grip and responsiveness to assist small agile multidirectional movements.

Value: $250 AUD - On the expensive side but they are a top of the range shoe!

Questions?