How to Fix Your Tennis Serve

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name's Lincoln Ward. I'm a USPTA certified teaching pro here in Austin, Texas, with Lone Star Tennis Company. Today we're going to talk about how to fix your serve. There are a lot of different culprits that are behind a faulty serve. The major ones are your ball toss, your weight distribution, and swinging too hard. Now, the first and most important is your ball toss. You want to have a very consistent ball toss so that your serve, you can hit the ball at the same spot every time. If you hit the ball at a different spot each time, there's no way you can have a consistent serve. So work on creating a consistent ball toss. A couple things you could do his hold the ball with two fingers and a thumb instead of rolling it off your hand. If you hold it with just two fingers and thumb, it goes straight up and down a lot easier. Another thing you could do is put your racket on the ground right at your foot where you want the ball to land, if you were not going to hit it, and just try practicing your ball toss and letting it drop, and seeing if it will land on your racket every time. The third thing you could do for a consistent ball toss is as you're releasing the ball, put all your weight on your front foot. That'll help you to stop leaning forward and leaning backwards, and adjusting that way to hit your serve. Consistency means you have to tighten up on your technique. The next thing--the next problem that you generally have is your motion. Your swing. A lot of times players want to swing and put on the breaks. The breaks are slowing you down. You're doing all this motion to get your racket head speed going fast enough to hit the ball, and here you are putting the breaks on. If you continue the motion and not have any breaks clear through to your opposite hip, you're not going to have any problem putting the heat on. You want to swing through your shot completely without breaks. If you put the breaks on then normally that means your slowing down right before contact. Keep going, keep going. There's no stopping. Once you start, keep it going. The last thing I want to say is in tennis, you can toss your ball up as many times as you want. If you have a bad ball toss in a match, don't hit the serve. It only counts as a fault if you actually make contact with the ball. So, you could toss the ball up as many times as you want until you get that perfect ball toss, and then clean them out. Take them to school. Turn them up. My name's Lincoln Ward. That's how a couple different techniques to fix your serve. Thanks a lot."