Many tennis players, young and old, struggle to serve with any sort of consistency. That's why this plan contains 5 simple drills to teach players to serve consistently, with control and not just power.
Being unable to serve consistently is the major cause of dropping tennis by many juniors, so coaches should put more emphasis on this mastery of this technique.
Ben, editor of Sportplan Tennis
What's in the session?
To focus on areas that are causing problems for players this plan starts with an upper body warm up before then moving onto 5 easy and specific exercises that will help players see results quickly.
We begin with the toss. The toss is responsible for control of the serve so players should never serve if they feel that the ball was placed in the wrong spot. The ability to toss the ball into the same spot over and over again is a base that has to be learned from the earliest stages of development. From here we then focus on a high point of contact and also getting a high trajectory/em> on the serve.
A tiebreak is a short sprint where every point is worth the same as a break of serve. The players who win them are rarely the ones who hit hardest. Here is how to coach the patterns, habits and scoreboard thinking that win the big points.
Most club players practise the serve on its own and then have no idea what to do with the ball that comes back. Serve plus one is the pattern that turns a good serve into a won point.
Wimbledon has just crowned another champion, and if you watched closely you saw the same thing every year: the best returners quietly won the tournament. Here is how to coach a return that pressures the server rather than just surviving it.
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