Your Strokes:
Jelena Jankovic: Serve

Analyzed by John Yandell

How good is Jelena’s serve?  Could moving toward the male serving model make it better?

This month I’m once again giving into popular demand and bringing back Your Strokes, and this time with quite an interesting subject, Jelena Jankovic’s serve.  One of the emerging issues in coaching and teaching now is the technical difference in the men’s and women’s  games, and particularly the serve.  The women in generally use different stances, much less body rotation, and have different contact points than the men. 

The question is: why?  Possibly it’s a case of the physical differences, particularly in the upper body structure.  Maybe women players are actually maximizing their ability with a certain technical style better suited to female physicality.

The Male Model?

Yet many of the better women servers have motions that are at least somewhat closer to those of the men.  And one of the great women’s players in recent history, Justine Henin, remodeled her motion based on video of Pete Sampras, transforming her serve from a liability to one of the best in the women’s game--despite her height.

So let’s look at Jelena’s motion and compare it to some of the top men.  She's a tremendous athlete, obviously. My opinion is that she could markedly improve her serving effectiveness by shifting several of the technical elements in her serve toward the male model.

Jelena Jankovic’s shoulder is Pete Sampras gorgeous.

I got interested in studying Jelena’s motion after my friend Pat Etcheberry, who is her physical training coach, asked me to film her at Indian Wells last year.  I’ve shared the footage and some of these thoughts both with Pat and with Jelena’s tour coach Ricardo Sanchez.  Already JJ’s made some adjustments, but I think she could still go a lot further, and with Indian Wells 2009 coming up again in a couple of months, who knows, maybe something will happen.

The first thing you can say about Jelena’s motion is that she has a gorgeous shoulder.  Yeah OK she’s attractive, but that’s not what I mean by gorgeous.  Her flexibility and range of motion are amazing.  Like Pete Sampras amazing.

Upper Arm Rotation

Watch how her upper arm rotates backward in the shoulder joint as her racket falls into the drop position.  Look how deep her drop is.  Then look at the angle of her upper arm.  It’s in line with her torso, virtually parallel to the line of the shoulders. 

Men servers like Roger or Pete turn well off the ball and are still partially closed at contact.

Her range of motion is one of the things that leads me to believe her serve could be so much better. But be careful, you could hurt yourself trying to duplicate this yourself.   Almost any player at any level can get into a good racket drop position, but very few can do it the way Jelena does, through backward or external rotation of the upper arm in the shoulder joint.  For most players a good drop usually means the upper arm is angled more forward and upward.

Body Rotation

So Jelena’s racket drop is as good as the best male servers.  But let’s look at the other factors, starting with the body rotation.  Virtually all the men turn the shoulders away from the baseline, to some greater or lesser degree.  Sampras, and John McEnroe before him, turned so much that their backs were partially facing the net.

They are the extreme examples, but you just don’t see much body rotation in any of the women’s serves.  And Jelena is a good example.  There is some minimal shoulder rotation in her motion, but nothing like most men.  It’s not only the amount of rotation.  It's also the pattern of the rotation and also the timing.

Jelena starts partially open, has little turn, and is wide open at contact.

Notice that Jelena actually starts with her shoulders open to the net.  As she moves through the windup her torso rotates somewhat in a clockwise direction.  But at the completion of this rotation, her shoulders are only sideways to the net, or possibly turned a little more in the ad court.  That’s where players like Federer and Sampras start.  So heretotal rotation is probably something like 30 degrees.

Compare this to Sampras or Federer.  Both start with the shoulders square to the net.  Then, as they wind up, there is far more turn off the ball. Federer probably rotates around 60 degrees, and for Sampras it’s even more. 

Shoulders at Contact

When the shoulders start to rotate forward into the hit Roger and Pete are starting from very different positions than JJ.  And this means that the angle of the shoulders is very different at contact.  For Federer and Sampras, the shoulders are still partially closed at contact.

The angle is probably somewhere between 30 and 45 degrees, with the angle being more extreme in the ad court.  This means the contact is somewhere in the middle of the rotational pattern. For Jelena her shoulders are wide open at contact.  So her rotational motion is not only less, it has beencompletely expended at contact.

Justine modeled her motion on Sampras as shown by her torso angle at contact.

In an upcoming article in collaboration with Brian Gordon, we’ll take a more detailed look at these as well as other factors, including quantitative measurements of these angles.  We also look at the actual speed of the body parts at various points in the motion.  It’s based on some amazing 3D filming we did of the great Pete Sampras.

Maybe this will also shed some light on the exact benefits of the more closed torso angles at contact.  But for now, I don’t think it’s too much to claim that there must be some biomechanical advantage.  It can’t be by chance that most of the great serves in the men’s game follow this pattern, and one of the most extreme examples, Sampras, is still arguably the greatest server in tennis history.

Interestingly, if you look at some of the other women with the best serves you can see more rotation and on a pattern closer to the men.  Justine Henin is the best example, but you can see less extreme versions of some of the same factors in the motions of both Serena Williams and Ana Ivanovic.  (Click Here for more on Serena’s motion.)

In general, sliding the back foot forward seems to impede torso rotation.

Stance

There is an additional factor in Jankovic’s motion—as with most women—that seems to effect the rotation, and this is the stance.  Jankovic starts with a fairly wide stance, and slides the back foot up during the windup.  The foot actually crosses to the right side of her body.  This is an extreme pinpoint stance, probably the dominant serving stance on the women’s tour. 

On the men’s side, there are plenty of pinpoints, but also a significant number of great servers using platform stances.  In the platform, the feet basically stay put until the player launches off the court.  Sampras and Federer are two of the best examples. 

When Jankovic drags her rear foot up, the right hip comes along, turning slightly into the motion, and this limits her potential rotation.  Roger and Pete in comparison turn away from the ball onto a line parallel to the line of the stance.  You can see in the animation how long the rear hip stays back and how that is related to the amount of body turn.  

At contact, JJ’s racket is to the right with the tip pointing almost directly upward, compare to the left tilt for Roger.

Contact Point

The final point to look at is the contact point, and this is also related to Jelena’s toss.  I’ve written quite a bit about the racket angle at contact and its relationship to spin.  (Click Here.) Virtually all the top men servers make contact with the racket tip angled to the left.  But if you look at Jelena at contact, the tip of her racket is pointing virtually directly upward.

This angle is related to the ball toss.  Watch Jelena’s tossing arm and the ball after the release.  She releases the toss with her arm at about a 30 degree angle to the baseline.  After the release, the ball travels virtually straight upward. 

Because of this ball position, when Jelena starts her upward swing she has to swing slightly more from left to right. The result is the racket position at the contact with the tip virtually upright.

In contrast, Sampras and Federer release the ball with the arm pointing more toward the sidelines.  The ball travels in a curve from the right to the left.  This means the contact point is further to the left, typically with the ball inside or to the left of the racket hand. 

Jelena’s toss, straight up and down, versus Roger’s on a right to left arc.

The result is the racket contact angle with the tip pointing to the left.  As we’ve explored, this ball position is one of the keys to adding topspin to the serve and hitting a heavy delivery.  It’s possible it may also effect the ball speed by making the upward swing more directly into the ball.

In Summary

So to summarize, Jelena has that gorgeous fluid arm motion.  But she has relatively little body rotation and an extreme pinpoint stance.  She tosses the ball straight up and down, and her contact point is quite far to the right, directly above her hitting hand. 

What if she changed her stance and started with her shoulders square?  What if moderated or eliminated the pinpoint and the sliding back foot?  What if she turned off the ball further and altered her toss to bring her contact back to the left?  These are experiment I would really like to see.  My guess is she could pick up significant ball speed as well as creating a heavier ball, with a higher topspin component.   Maybe we’ll never see the experiment conducted, but then again, maybe we will.

John Yandell is widely acknowledged as one of the leading videographers and students of the modern game of professional tennis. His high speed filming for Advanced Tennis and Tennisplayer have provided new visual resources that have changed the way the game is studied and understood by both players and coaches. He has done personal video analysis for hundreds of high level competitive players, including Justine Henin-Hardenne, Taylor Dent and John McEnroe, among others.

In addition to his role as Editor of Tennisplayer he is the author of the critically acclaimed book Visual Tennis. The John Yandell Tennis School is located in San Francisco, California.

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