Visualize if you will that there is a vertical window suspended in the air somewhere between the service line and the net. On the serve, your ball must pass through the window in order for it to be good. Above the window, the ball sails beyond the service line; below the window, the ball lands in the net.

To get a better idea of how this window affects your serve, serve a couple of balls from a point half way between the baseline and the service line. Your service window should be quite large. Take advantage of the larger opening of the window and serve a few really hard ones. Now take a few steps back toward the baseline and serve again. You'll see that the size of the window decreases. You can't serve as hard and with the same consistency as you were up closer. Back on the baseline, the window is even smaller.

At your current height and serving skill level, your window is more-or-less fixed. When you were inside the baseline serving, it was the same as if you were taller than you actually are. Tall players have a big advantage in serving because their window is much larger than the window for shorter people. With a larger window, their margin for error is larger and they can serve much harder. (Incidentally, if everyone understood this concept clearly, there would be less tolerance for foot-faulters, even in social tennis).

Fortunately, there are several things you can do to increase the vertical height of your window.

1. Extend your arm and your racquet as high as you can when you make contact with the ball.
2. Rise up on your toes as you strike the ball.
3. Bend your knees so that as you extend to strike the ball your feet actually come off the ground.
4. Hit the ball with topspin
5. Toss the ball about a foot or so higher, so that it is already falling by the time you strike it.
6. Toss the ball farther into the court.

Following suggestions 1, 2, and 3 will allow you to increase the height at which you make contact with the ball. This essentially makes you a "taller" server (Mark Philippoussis rather than Michael Chang) and thus increases your vertical window. Simply extending upward as much as you can will add at least 5" to the height at which you make ball contact. Rising up on your toes or actually coming off the ground as you strike the serve will add several more inches.

Suggestion 4 increases the upward angle at which the ball leaves your racquet. After rising, the forward spinning ball dips sharply downward, creating an arc in its trajectory. The effect is as if you served the ball from a much higher height, and the size of your window increases accordingly.

Tossing the ball higher (suggestion 5) creates a natural topspin without the severe back arching and strenuous brushing up the back of the ball required of the topspin serve. The falling ball leaves the racquet at impact at a sharply higher angle than if you tossed the ball only as high as the point of contact. The benefit here increases if you can also incorporate the first three suggestions into your serve.

Tossing the ball farther in front of you so that contact is made inside the court is equivalent to standing inside the baseline when hitting your current unimproved serve. You are closer to the net and as mentioned above this automatically increases the opening of your vertical window.

All of the above suggestions allow you to increase the size of your window, making it easier to hit a good serve. With a larger window, you can now begin to serve harder because you'll have a bigger margin for error. Speed or power, however, tends to diminish the size of your window. The harder you try to hit your serve, the more faults you will begin to have.

I suggest that you try to incorporate into your serve all of the "window openers" discussed earlier. Make your window as large as you can. Then, gradually begin to add pace. At some point you will find that your percentages begin to fall off dramatically. What you should do now is reduce the pace a little, perhaps by hitting up on the ball more and trying to put more spin on the serve. Try to serve with the same amount of energy-that is, don't slow down your swing--just let more of that energy go into spin production rather than all-out power.

What you are looking for is the right balance of pace and spin that will give you a first serve percentage somewhere around 60% or better. You should probably be winning the vast majority of the points when you do get your first serve in and winning at least half of the points on your second serve. This should give you an overall winning service percentage, allowing you to hold your own serve rather easily. Winning the set now becomes a matter of breaking your opponent's serve.

Finally, the truly best way to improve your serve is to practice it. Pros hit 100s of practice serves a day. That's why their serves are powerful and consistent. Yours, too, can improve with practice, and by adopting some of the suggestions presented above.

Randy Cummings
Match Point Racquet Sports
www.racquetgear.com