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Your serving mindset
I was working with my friend Bret on a kick second serve.
Bret’s a 4.0 player and has a nice second serve, but I was looking for
more consistency, depth and spin. Bret and I make an interesting Mutt
and Jeff team. He is 6'5" and I’m 5'6"! Don’t tell him, but as his coach,
I love telling him what to do on the court. :)
At one point in his lesson while serving he hit a series
of beautiful kick second serves. Each time I said, “great serve” he said,
“But my opponent would hit it back!” Then I said, “wait a minute, do you
think the second serve is supposed to be hit so well that your opponent
cannot return it?” He said, “yes.” And I realized he was judging the effectiveness
of a serve on whether it comes back or not. Do you do the same thing?
The effectiveness of a second serve is determined by the
quality of your opponents return, not whether they can hit it back or
not. If your opponent hits a return that you can work with and keep pressure
on them, you have a successful second serve. If your opponent is constantly
hitting winners off of your serve and creating stress on you, you have
a problem!
Even with the first serve the criteria for a good serve
is not whether it comes back or not, but whether you have created enough
pressure on your opponent to solicit a weaker return. Yes, even though
you would like to hit service aces along the way, if you don’t, this does
not mean you have a poor serve.
If you think the serve is not supposed to come back and
your opponents do return it, you will think you have done something wrong.
As a result, you begin hitting your serve harder and making more errors.
The only plus in this scenario is you will have many opportunities to
practice “the next shot is more important than the last mistake!”
Tom Veneziano
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Copyright © 2001 Tom Veneziano. All rights reserved
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