Are You Being Served?

The hardest part of tennis is learning how to serve. The amazing thing about professional players isn't so much the pace of their serves, though that's pretty amazing, but that they can get it in the court so reliably.

Just to give you a sense of how hard the serve is, watch some slow motion serves. Here's a link to the serve of Joachim Johansson. In case you don't know who Joachim Johansson is, he's a 6'6" Swedish tennis player with a huge serve. We're talking speeds that are comparable to Andy Roddick. I was watching some Davis Cup rerun with US against Sweden, and Johansson was making Roddick's life miserable with his serve.

OK, let's start with the arm itself. People often talk about a wrist snap when serving. It's more properly called wrist pronation, which is something Vic Braden pointed out. Most average players really have a hard time understanding this, much less hitting it properly. Basically, if you watch the pros in slow motion, it appears as if they are about to hit the ball edge on.

At the last moment, they pronate their wrist, and the racquet face is flat on for the moment it's hit, and then it flip over so the racquet face which had been pointing to the left (for a rightie), then flat on, is now pointing to the right. To get a sense of this, take your right hand and raise it above your head.

Then, have the palm point left. This means your thumb would be (were it ninety degrees to your fingers pointing straight up) pointing behind you. Now, turn your palm forward. Your thumb points left.

Then, turn your palm to the right, which is pretty awkward. Your thumb points forward.

This motion, when done really fast, is wrist pronation. I've heard the analogy of whipping very much like using a large thermometer.

The way to learn wrist pronation is to really simplify the motion and just think backswing, and minimal follow through (with the pronation). Very hard to get this right, but easier then adding all the other motion to the serve.

Beyond that, there's the knee bend, the location of the hips, the hip rotation, the backscratching position, etc. That is, your hips and knees also play a role in hitting a big serve, in addition to the hard part of wrist pronation.

The other thing I learned was to "throw" the racquet, which gives it acceleration all the way through. I'd often just worry about hitting it at the point of contact, and making it more from the elbow on up, rather than the rest of the arm. I used to know this guy, who, when he was young, played baseball. The ball throwing movement he was used to making made for a really powerful serve, so the analogy of "throwing" the racquet is not so far off (except I was never that good at throwing a ball).

What you often see the average player do is to push the ball forward using the wrist as a hinge. Compared to the proper way to hit a serve, it's far simpler, but not that great for applying spin, and also not great for power. While the motion of wrist pronation feels more natural the more your practice it, it certainly feels completely unnatural until you learn how to hit it properly. And of course, it's completely unintuitive, which is why the average player would never learn it on their own without having slomo video of top servers (and they wouldn't even know what to look for, and how to achieve that motion).

What's something of a relief is that Roger Federer is not one of the biggest servers in the game. His serve might be fifth best in the world or lower, behind Sampras, Johansson, Roddick, Isner, and a few others. But it is pretty effective, nonetheless, and he returns really well too. It's interesting to note that the top two matches in terms of aces with 55 and 51 aces respectively, the person who served the most aces lost. Even with lots of aces, it needs to be timed right. When you don't get an ace, you still need to win points. And there's still the return of serve.

Which isn't to say a powerful serve doesn't help. It helped Sampras, Lendl, McEnroe, Edberg, Safin, etc. But there are many players with incredible serves which helps them get in the top 50, or even the top 30, but not much further. As hard as Roddick hits his serve, he can still hit a pretty good forehand and backhand, otherwise, he wouldn't even be mentioned as a top player.

So learning a serve is pretty tough!