Teaching Serves and the racket drop

[bman]

I have found that there are two distinctive camps when it comes to the racket drop in teaching serves, and they are nicely illustrated in the two serve articles from this month's issue.

When doing a half serve or abbreviated serve, some people, like Chris Lewitt in the illustration for his TED drills, like to see the servers start with the racket down behind the back. Salzenstein emphasizes in all his serve videos to start the racket up, and then drop the racket after the toss.

Where do you come down on this issue?

[stotty]

The serve

I have found that there are two distinctive camps when it comes to the racket drop in teaching serves, and they are nicely illustrated in the two serve articles from this month's issue.

When doing a half serve or abbreviated serve, some people, like Chris Lewitt in the illustration for his TED drills, like to see the servers start with the racket down behind the back. Salzenstein emphasizes in all his serve videos to start the racket up, and then drop the racket after the toss.

Where do you come down on this issue?

Great post, great question. The serve is an incredibly complex and interesting stroke. I am always trying to improve my understanding of it whenever I can.

The half serve is a great way to illustrate the trophy position and the racket drop, especially if you have a camcorder to hand. If I want to deepen the racket drop on a player, I always have them start from the half swing so they can focus on better on the downward swing and the racket drop.

Many players with flawed swings find they can serve harder from a half serve than with their full swing. Take away the flawed clutter and start the serve at the crux of things, and players suddenly improve. Suddenly players realize the problem isn't so much the trophy position or even the racket drop...it's more to do with a problem earlier down the road...maybe right at the beginning of the road.

Serving is all about rhythm. There are a couple of guys on the forum who will tell you that if you initiate the the very first part of the swing correctly, the rest will often take care of itself. If you watch Michael Stich, Pancho Gonzales and a host of other classic servers...watch their hands and arms work together perfectly as they initiate their service motions...with such perfect starts it hard to imagine anything going wrong with serves theirs. Just beautiful to watch as well.

[tennis_chiro]

Stotty's right again! It's the rhythm!

Great post, great question. The serve is an incredibly complex and interesting stroke. I am always trying to improve my understanding of it whenever I can.

The half serve is a great way to illustrate the trophy position and the racket drop, especially if you have a camcorder to hand. If I want to deepen the racket drop on a player, I always have them start from the half swing so they can focus on better on the downward swing and the racket drop.

Many players with flawed swings find they can serve harder from a half serve than with their full swing. Take away the flawed clutter and start the serve at the crux of things, and players suddenly improve. Suddenly players realize the problem isn't so much the trophy position or even the racket drop...it's more to do with a problem earlier down the road...maybe right at the beginning of the road.

Serving is all about rhythm. There are a couple of guys on the forum who will tell you that if you initiate the the very first part of the swing correctly, the rest will often take care of itself. If you watch Michael Stich, Pancho Gonzales and a host of other classic servers...watch their hands and arms work together perfectly as they initiate their service motions...with such perfect starts it hard to imagine anything going wrong with serves theirs. Just beautiful to watch as well.

Once again, Stotty is going right for the salient point. There's a lot of good stuff in both of those articles, but if you want to get the serve in the box, you better have a way to consistently toss the ball to the right spot and get everything in the right place at the right time, whether that spot is a little more to the left for a spin/kicker or not. You must synchronize the weight transfer or rock to the toss of the ball. That rock is the lynchpin that holds everything together, whether you go front to back to front like Stich and Gonzales or just back to front like Sampras or even something slightly different for Federer. We can argue all day and all night about which method is superior, but the linkage must exist between the toss and that rock.

So when you practice that half swing from trophy position, you still want to have some kind of a rock that can be used to synchronize the motion. I use what I call the "Hiccup" (it's been described elsewhere in the Forum, I think) because I have the student rock as they put the racket up in the trophy position, then rock back to the beginning as the body resets and then have the right arm wait for the toss to take place as the weight goes forward. One way or another, you need that rhythmic link to be successful under pressure or even when you are a bit fatigued. Roddick's toss and rock action is very complicated, but he absolutely repeats it the same way every time in exactly the same rhythm. I doubt very much he could tell you exactly what he does without going through the motion and taking it apart bit by bit. He just goes with his rhythm.

The following clip will give you a good idea of how I work with an abbreviated swing to get the sense of the racket drop. Especially check the clip from about 9 minutes in.

http://silviahosokawa.smugmug.com/Sports/Don-Brosseau-tennis/Pro-Coach-Don-Brosseau-Serve/25172510_SsRvRb#!i=2064669908&k=NkQg8HW

Just two warnings about points in those articles:
1. I liked Tom Downs' article about Stosur's serve, but be very careful about failing to complete the followthrough to the left side. When the arm stops on the same side, the muscles of the forearm maintain a tension that puts undue stress on the elbow. The motion may go more to the right as you try to develop a kick, but still finish to the left to relax those muscles. You certainly can generate more kick by going out to the right, but a steady diet of that move is almost guaranteed to give you a tennis elbow in the long run. It's kind of like throwing a screwball. Great pitch, but tough to last.

2. Jeff Salzenstein advocates less internal rotation, or at least a different finish position in his "Dirty Daiper" with regard to the position of the edge of the racket. Understand that while the racket may move off to the side a little more, there is no less internal rotation of the racket. Just take a look at the pictures of the 2nd serve action of the highlighted serve here, that of Stosur.

http://www.tennisplayer.net/members/tour_strokes/tom_downs/sam_stosur_serve/index.html

Check the third clip up from the end of the article to see the difference in her 1st and 2nd serve. The racket is certainly headed more to the right, but look at the angle of the back of her hand and recognize that there is no less of that internal rotation. It's a nice drill and helpful in finding the feel of the second serve, but I think the point Jeff is making about the angle of the racket face at least suggests that there is less internal rotation taking place in the 2nd serve and that is simply fallacious. For the kick serve, the arc of path of the center of the racket face is definitely going to be more to the right, but relative to the plane of that arc, there is just as much or more internal rotation and you would be unwise to try to limit that action. On the contrary, you need to emphasize it and increase it.

Finally, let me note that it is much easier to learn the wrist action to generate a kick or even just straight topspin serve by tossing the ball well to the left and even a little behind you. I tell my students to toss the ball behind their right ear. This facilitates the action of the hit, but it also leads to too much arching with the back and eventually to other problems. So I also tell them that we only use this kind of toss until they get the feel of the action. I don't want them straining their backs. Once they learn that action, I want the toss just slightly (a couple of inches at most) to the left of the regular toss and I want them to be able to hit the ball out in front, eventually with topspin and a kick. Probably not as far in front as their first serves, but in front. If you keep the ball back behind you, besides straining your back, you will not have enough penetration on your second serve. It will look really neat as it changes direction on the bounce…until a good player starts to step up and wallop it from well inside the baseline. You have to learn to get that wrist action (hitting up and across the ball) well enough to produce the action out in front so your serve penetrates as well as kicks. And if you are going to do that, you better have all the internal rotation you can get!

don

[bman]

Wow, thanks for the long and thoughtful responses, both of you! The serve is very hard to teach and after 11 years of teaching, I still feel like I have more questions than answers.

[tennis_chiro]

We need your answers as well as your questions!

Wow, thanks for the long and thoughtful responses, both of you! The serve is very hard to teach and after 11 years of teaching, I still feel like I have more questions than answers.

Bman,
We need you to come back to the forum with your answers to your own questions as well as the questions. This is a collaborative effort and we need your input and your 11 years of evidently thoughtful experience. Nobody is getting paid here to pontificate. When I put something up here that is a little different (I hope occasionally it is), I expect to be challenged. I want to defend that something and if I can't, then I have to change and adapt to some greater knowledge. So, while it is really nice to have all that positive feedback, we need some critical discussion with input from all the hundreds and probably thousands of years of teaching experience the participants in this forum possess. And it's not just teaching experience; a lot of the contributors here are not actual teaching pros, but avid students of the game; their input is no less valuable as they have tremendously valuable feedback as to how all these cockamamy drills work.

So…looking forward to seeing more of your questions… as well as your answers!

don