The Serving Stroke

 I helped Kirby with a beginners' and intermediates' pickleball introduction recently in San Ramon.  I offered to help by passing on some instruction in re serving.  

I wanted to talk about serving rather than dinking or volleying or ground strokes as I feel it's probably the most important portion of the game.  That is, in some ways and not so much in others. 

My current belief is that serving is important as it is the one chance to win a point, and if your side has the ball, the game is not lost.  Thus getting the serve in is the important part.  Hitting a non-returnable serve is wonderful, but don't do it if you miss some of them too.

The topic I wanted to discuss, is that of the serve stroke itself.  I borrowed deeply from my golf swing knowledge to promote some shoulder rotation into the students' strokes.  

Since the paddle weighs little and the ball weight much less, you can get away with just an arm swing or if you come from racquet ball, you can just flip your hand at it.

But if you golf, or bowl, or play tennis, then you should have some shoulder turn already.  This is useful to PB as it promotes the use of the large muscles of the body, which will be less prone to error when tired or when the pressure is on, e.g., playing a tight match in a tournament.

Basics:

We stand in the middle of the serve side (assuming doubles).

Feet should be facing towards the center of area into which you are serving.  Think 45 degrees or so.  Your aim is to hit the ball into the center of the service area.  (When you can do that all the time, then worry about getting it deeper and/or playing deliberately to a backhand or forehand side.)

Now with left hand holding the ball out in front of you, you want to rotate the shoulders to move the paddle behind you.  This doesn't have to be far, if you are from tennis, you probably have a longish wind up and that's fine, but it's more movement than you need.  

The vision of our wound up position might be that the left arm is extended in front, and the right arm is behind you (maybe a lot, and maybe a little, your right arm might be bent a bit, more stylistic than of issue).  Your weight should be on your back foot.

At the wound up position your right shoulder should be higher your than the left - there should be a bit of turn via the torso or legs.  For this to happen, you need to be a bit bent over.  You are not standing straight up.  It is an inclined plane as is the golf swing.  The shoulders are not level to the ground.

Next is to step or shift your weight to the front foot.  Then the swing starts.  You drop the ball from your left hand and now we rotate the shoulders.  

The shoulder rotation will do a couple of wonderful things, one is that if will pull your left hand out of the way of the paddle, secondly it will bring the paddle up to hit the ball.  I see some new players who hold the ball in front of them near the impact position and then make an arm swing and let go of the ball microseconds before impact.  They don't look comfortable and it seems they are worried about bruised fingers.  Drop the ball early and higher and let the shoulder rotation move the left arm out of the way, but...

An important point here is the height from which you drop the ball.  I'd suggest about neck high, with the intention of hitting it after it has dropped below the waist.  And per the rules, you have to hit the ball from below your navel.  It's wonderful how that all works out.  

There is a lot of time to do this.  The ball will not fall very quickly and you can use your shoulders in a very leisurely pace.  (Let me see, 32 feet/second^2 is the acceleration assuming we are on Earth and the wind is not blowing too badly.  We have a drop of about 3 feet, the ball starts at zero feet per second.  Hmm, "Google how fast does it take a ball to drop three feet?"  ...And that would be 0.43 seconds.  Plenty of time to swing at it.)

The shoulders rotate in place, with the right going down / forward and up and the left moving up a bit, then back a bit.  Your spine will straighten out and you should be close to standing upright when the smoke clears.

If you do it correctly your chest will be facing your target before the ball is hit.  

Let the momentum of the swing stand you up and face you forward.  Your paddle will be up in the air and you are ready to face the service return.  

Also note that your weight has shifted to the front foot, but your body stays behind the baseline.  Please don't move forward until you judge the service return will be short.  (Pet peeve number two.)

Let me emphasize a number of points:

• Wait for the weight shift (feel free to actually step forward) before swinging
• You have a lot of time, don't feel the need to hurry the shoulder  turn
• There is not a lot of hand/paddle manipulation in this, the swing will do that.
• Drop the ball above the impact area
• The location where you strike the ball will determine its height over the net.  There is a lot of subtle adjustments happening here, all automatic, as our bodies are really good at making things happen.  In any case don't worry about it, if the serves are long or too high, you will quickly adjust.
• Don't worry about trying to hit a hard serve, just get them in.  

There is a nice drill for this weight shift.  A lot of the students had trouble with this.  There were swings off of the back foot and such.  This is important for all the ground strokes too.  You want your weight forward to hit a sufficiently powerful shot.

Start with both feet together, take a modest back swing, step forward with your left foot, then drop the ball and swing.  It's the step part that is useful as it will quickly let you feel where your weight is and keep you from swinging too early/quickly.  You can do this without a ball or into the fence.  (Community service tip:  this is true for golf too, so this drill serves several masters.)

I wanted to talk about spinning the serve.  I've addressed it before in an earlier post.  But I've got a new analogy to try on you all.  But next post!