(by Larry Hodges)

I’ve watched players, even top players, spend hour after hour practicing the simplest serves imaginable. Yes, you need to practice basic serves so you develop near-perfect control of their height, depth, and direction. But it’s drudgery to practice such serves over and Over and OVER when there’s so much more you can do.

Serve practice is where you also work on putting trickery into your serves, in particular deception. Imagine you are serving to a real player. Practice hiding your spin with fast racket movements where you exaggerate one direction of the racket while contacting the ball in a different way with a barely noticeable twitch of your racket. Or work on maximizing your spin to the point where the ball seemingly explodes into flame. Or, after developing super-spinny serves, learn to use the same motion but serve with no-spin by contacting the ball near the handle. Or work on fast and spinny aggressive serves where you jam your opponent’s middle or spin it away from him at the corners. Or fast dead ones, especially at their elbow, that they put in the net.

There is so much more to serving than just putting the ball in play. If you are doing it right, it’s both a science and an art – and a blast to practice!