Speed or Consistency on Tennis Serve
Subtitles: 
| Dubbing: N/A
A typical question every player has to ask himself is when they're hitting a first serve how hard do they wanna hit it and how often do they wanna get their serve in.
What do they want their first serve percentage to be. Howard Brody, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania did a study that showed, let's say your maximum serve speed was 100 mph that's as hard as you can hit it, and you've got it in 50% of the time; If you dropped your serve speed to 90 mph, so in other words, you hit 90% as hard as you could your serve was now 30 % more likely to go in so, in other words, at 90 mph your serve would go in 65% of the time again, as oppose to 100 mph where your serve would only go in half the time, 50% of the time.
A lot of player like to step up to the baseline toss the ball and just hit as hard as they can. It's fun to go for the ace.
But there are a number of advantages for dropping your first serve speed down a little bit.
Consistency is one of those. Like Dr. Brody proved in his study if you drop your speed a little bit you'll get much more consistent.
That's huge. But there are also some other advantages I wanna talk about.
The first is variety. Keeping your opponent guessing every single time you step up to the baseline for first serve is an enormous advantage. You want your opponent to have to worry about where you gonna put the serve how hard you gonna hit it and what kind of spin you're gonna put on the ball.
So, if you hit at a base service speed let's say 90mph and you can go up from there as well as down your opponent is not gonna know how hard you're gonna hit it. If you just rip it let's say 100 mph every single time that's one less thing your opponent has to worry about Now he only has to worry about the placement and the spin and maybe even fewer than that because if you're hitting as hard as you can you might sacrifice, you might lose some of that other variety.
You won't have as much spin, you might not be able to control the placement as well.
Let me talk about Pete Sampras for a minute to emphasize how important variety is And how much more important variety is than power.
Pete Sampras's average first serve speed was about 120 mph which is certainly fast but it wasn't nearly as fast as some of the other guys he played agaist.
Now, that said Pete had arguable and in my opinion the best serve ever because yes he has some pace but also had spin and placement and those three things made his serve devastating.
His opponents never knew what was coming They didn't know how hard he was gonna hit it they didn't know where it was going and he could put that serve on a dime and they didn't know what kind of spin he was going to put on the ball. So, Pete's example is instructive for everybody else He achieved the gratest serve of all time through variety and not power Chances are you can attain your best possible serve through variety as oppose to power as well. The second point I wanna make and this sort of goes back to Dr Brody's findings is that up until about the top 500 player in the world tennis is entirely a game of errors.
It's about winning a battle of errors.
If you make more errors than your opponent you probably gonna lose and if your opponent makes more errors than you you are most likely going to win.
In my opinion, missing a high number of first serves is a huge error. For most players their second serve is a defensive shot and if you take a little bit off your first serve it's still gonna be a weapon and if you can get it in 30% more often that means you're on offense 30% more of the time.
Let's face it, you are probably not facing Agassi so you don't have to worry about taking that little bit extra off your first serve.
The other thing this does is it gives you a psychological advantage.
If you have a very high first serve percentage your opponent is going to notice that, that's going to put a lot of pressure on him to serve well and hold serve because he figures he's gonna have a tough time breaking you.
So next time you go out to serve think about taking a little bit off your first serve maybe put a little bit more spin on the ball so that it gets pulled into the court and that may allow you to place it little bit better and that should help you serve more effectively of your first serve.
