Your Strokes:
Arthur Gosnell Serve

Analyzed by John Yandell

This month's Your Strokes analyzes the serve of Arthur Gosnell, a high school player at St. Andrew's School in Middletown, Delaware, sent in by his coach and a long time Tennisplayer subscriber, Chris Childers.

And everyone thinking about sending in video please take note of the great job Chris did. Not only is it high def, Chris set the high speed shutter so we have clear still frames of the key parts of the motion.

But, besides the quality, there was something else unusual about this footage. Chris told me that in working with Arthur, he followed a convention that is much more common in video analysis in golf than in tennis.

That was to try to match the player with a pro model based on body type and swing characteristics. So for Arthur, he picked Stan Wawrinka, first because of his height and body type, and second because he hit with a pinpoint stance.

I have no idea how that all works in golf. But I have doubts about how well it translates to tennis, and particularly on the serve. In fact after looking at Arthur and Stan, my conclusion is that Chris may have done too good a job, and that at certain points Arthur's serve follows Stan's too closely.

The similarities in the motions are striking, that's for sure. It's just that certain elements in Stan's serve are not that sound, and some of those seem to be the ones Arthur has copied.

So let's go through and take a look at the two motions - Arthur's and Stan's--and see where they are similar and whether that is good or bad. Then, let's make some additional suggestions and provide some additional model footage as possible alternatives for Arthur.

Pinpoint

If you have read some of my other serve articles, (Click Here) you know that in general I am not a huge fan of the pinpoint stance. However, there is no doubt that many very good servers use it or have used it: Tomas Berdych, Mark Philippoussis, Marat Safin, Pat Rafter, Juan Martin DelPotro, and Jo Wilfred Tsonga, to name a few.

And so does Stan. But there are a couple of interesting elements in Wawrinka's pinpoint that are less than ideal. The first is the unique relation between the feet just prior to the launch. Notice that Stan has come up onto the balls of his front foot with the heel off the ground. But his rear foot has stayed flat on the court. That's unusual.

But notice how well Arthur has modeled this same position, with the heel of the front foot up and the heel of the rear foot flat on the court. Could this matter? Is it a good thing? Or, possibly, the opposite of a good thing?

One of the main alleged strengths of the pinpoint is that the player pushes more with the rear foot compared to a platform. But try that position for yourself with one heel up and one heel down and feel that there is less coiling in the rear leg with the rear heel flat. And I think that definitely means less push.

Compare this to the animation of a great pinpoint server like Mark Philippoussis. Note how when he coils the distribution of the weight is more even, with both legs coiled to a similar degree with the weight on the balls of both feet and the heels off the court surface at a similar angle.

I think there is a reason Philippoussiss, Safin, Tsonga, Del Potro, etc, all reach something like that position. Not that Stan doesn't serve well enough to be a top 20 player. Obviously he does.

But I am not convinced that this foot pattern is optimum for the pinpoint, or that Warinka himself couldn't get a lot more out of his stance if it was closer to some of the great pinpoint servers.

Contact

But there is another similarity here between Arthur and Stan that I think is even more critical. And that is the issue of the contact point. We've seen many times that, for effective servers at all levels, the contact is at the front edge or possibly very slightly in front of the plane of the body. Basically the face of the racket is lined up about with the edge of the nose.

Wawrinka doesn't make contact there. He is one of the very few pro players, maybe the only the pro player I've looked at, who makes contact significantly further back.

Look at the animation and it's pretty startling. The contact point is over the top of his head, probably six inches or more behind the front edge of the body. That can't be good for the efficiency of the serve, and has to be harder on the shoulder as well, particularly in the long run.

Not a great idea for a young player either, right? But guess what? Arthur has modeled this contact point almost perfectly. Notice in the animation that you can draw a line from the top of his head straight up to the ball. And, as with Wawrinka, this puts the contact point is behind the front edge of the body by several inches or more.

Of course there is no way to prove that this position leads to injury for every player, but there has to be a reason why virtually all elite servers make contact further in front. If you have tried this contact position for yourself, you know one thing for sure, you can't get nearly as much energy into the serve.

Racket Drop

There is a third issue here with Arthur's motion, the racket drop. But here he could actually have benefited if he had modeled Stan more closely.

Whatever can be said pro or con about Stan's motion, one thing is certain, he has a great racket drop. In fact he often goes further than the classic pro position shown here, rotating the line of racket and the racket tip further to his right, something we saw was a characteristic of Andy Roddick's motion. (Click Here.) Maybe that compensates in some way or makes up for the contact point.

Now if we look at Arthur's motion we can see that his drop isn't terrible. We have definitely seen worse in other Your Strokes articles.

But it still doesn't reach the pro drop position. As we have seen the checkpoint for this is the plane of the racket dropping parallel to the right side of his torso.

At the full drop, a line drawn across the front of the torso is more or less perpendicular to a line drawn across the face of the racket. From this position, the racket is in position to move directly upward to the contact.

This full drop position seems to maximize the effect of the elbow extension, and especially, the upward and forward rotation of the hand and arm. If we look at Arthur, we can see that the line of his racket face never reaches the edge of the torso and is at a diagonal across the plane of his back. He doesn't have much if any rotation after contact, and this is probably the reason why.

A Plan

So we've seen that there are problems with the racket drop, and especially the contact point. And also that the use of the rear leg in the pinpoint is probably not optimal. So what's the solution. Start by improving the pinpoint stance?

I'd say that the stance issue needs to be suspended. Here I think we can take a page straight out of a recent Tennisplayer article by Kerry Mitchell. (Click Here.)

Kerry makes a great point about the relative importance of leg action versus arm action. And I agree. Unless the actual swing pattern is technically sound, it doesn't matter how much leg drive a player gets, or thinks he gets.

To deal with these and similar problems, Kerry has players hit from a stationary stance. This is what I am recommending for Arthur. Correct the more basic problems first, by developing the ability to execute what Kerry calls a sound "arm swing."

A key here is adjusting the toss and moving the contact point in front. And with the complications of launching with the legs into the court (no matter what the stance) it's possible those changes might never happen.

The first step here is he needs to model a better racket drop. To do this, he may need to open up his windup. As with many players who abbreviate the backswing, I think that this motion is probably restricting his ability to reach a full drop.

So I suggest he try an exercise I've used with success with pro players, college players, and club players alike. What I call the "windmill."

This means swinging the arm and racket freely in a circle from the shoulder, then allowing gravity to take over at the top of the circle, letting the racket fall into the drop. The whole arm should be very relaxed when you do this, and the racket may actually bounce off your back. That's good.

Arthur can alternate this by actually starting from the correct drop position and hitting from there. And here Chris, his coach, can play the critical role with that video camera. Chris, don't stop working this until you can see Arthur is actually reaching that full drop position.

Toss

Obviously the exact position of the contact point is intimately related to the toss. So Arthur needs to model the contact point in front of the edge of his body - or aligned say with the front edge of his nose. He needs to close his eyes, visualize that, and be able to move from the drop to the contact point without the ball and with his eyes closed.

Then he has practice tossing to the image of this contact point. Again the video camera will tell the tale. Chris needs to film this from the side angle.

But there is something else I think Chris can try. This is having Arthur continue to hit from a stationary stance, but for Chris to actually toss the balls.

If he stands on his knees to Arthur's right, he can toss the ball so that the contact point will necessarily be in front of the body. Arthur's job is to go from that new, perfect drop to the contact point without any leg movement.

Depending on what the video camera sees, Chris and Arthur can go back and forth, taking turns making the toss, until the contact point looks the same no matter who is throwing the ball up.

Back to the Stance

Now we can get back to where we started - the stance. And what I am going to suggest is that, after working on the toss with a stationary stance, Arthur at least initially try modeling a platform.

This is not only because I prefer the platform for players I work with, but also because of the constellation of problems that were associated with Arthur's version of the pinpoint. If he simply goes back to the old stance, some of the feelings associated with the previous serve are bound to come back, and when they do, he may be risking losing the racket drop and the improved contact.

So I suggest a simple platform to start. And again I think Kerry nailed this in his article. Arthur and Chris can follow his suggestions virtually point by point. This means just relaxing the knees and letting the weight drop naturally, and then combining that with a moderate kick back with rear leg.

Kick Back

This is another important point about his previous stance. You can see in all the animations of Arthur's serve that the kick back with the rear leg is relatively small. In the some cases, it doesn't exist and the leg just comes directly around.

In my experience this can be related to the pinpoint. Because the back leg is moving forward and around in the pinpoint motion, it sometimes just continues - rather than changing direction and kicking back hard away from the player.

It's very important that the leg kick back, both for balance, and to insure that the legs and torso uncoil correctly. Some players like Roddick have huge high kick backs. To some extent this is probably related to the depth of the knee bend and the amount of explosion up into the ball.

For Arthur, I think he should start with a very moderate backward kick. Kerry shows this well in his article, but just for another great example, you can take a look at Roger Federer.

First, he starts from a simple balanced stance. The front foot is roughly parallel to the baseline. There is a moderate offset to the feet.

Watch how as he goes up to the ball the rear leg kicks back. A great checkpoint is finishing with the sole of the shoe pointing more less directly at the back fence. This should help get the legs back in action without disrupting the more critical basic elements.

So I think Arthur should try the platform, film it and see. And try to stick with it. But, if everything holds together, and the pinpoint action comes back without disrupting anything else, that is not necessarily a problem.

The danger is if it impedes the kick back and he goes back toward the foot alignment in the old serve. So Arthur and Chris should both pay very close attention to the problems with the feet we looked at the beginning of the article.

I've seen this transition back to the pinpoint happen before, for example in the work I did with an elite senior player, Jeff Greenwald. Working from the platform was part of the cure for some other problems we saw in his motion. But once these were resolved the pinpoint came back naturally without destroying the other changes. (Click Here.)

Jeff was an experienced former college and pro player and has won national senior championships, so obviously the situation is different.

But if the pinpoint tendency starts to reemerge, one option for Arthur is to reconfigure his feet and alter the position of that rear heal. And for that, let's pick another model, similar to the one above of Philipoussiss, Tomas Berdych.

I like Berdych's pinpoint because he doesn't start with his feet set in a super wide stance and doesn't have to drag the back foot so far at the start of the motion. More importantly, he moves the rear foot up directly behind the front foot with the weight on the balls of both feet, not on either heel. From this position the player can use the kick back with the rear leg naturally and automatically.

So there we have it. A very interesting example of the power and the possible pitfalls of pro modeling! There are a lot of important elements to work on, but if Arthur can move his motion in the direction we have suggested, I think both he and Chris will see a huge difference. Chris, keep us posted ok?