How to Develop a Great Second Serve

Thanks for clicking on the video. My name is Tom Allsopp. Today I'm going to show you how to develop a great second serve. I'm going to show you the skills and strategies for putting the ball in the box with speed, with spin and help you to be able to do that when it really matters, when it's a big point. So I often see players whacking their first serve. It doesn't go in all that often and then their second is a push or it's restricted in some kind of way. Now my challenge to you is to see if you can develop a smooth coordinated service motion and be able to do that motion at different speeds. So for example I can execute my serve at 50% power but I can do the same motion at 20%, 10%, 80% and I look like the same player. So when I'm going at 20% I'm not just pushing and being tight on my shoulder or not following through. I'm able to complete my motion and just control how fast I hit the tennis ball. Now if I can get my technique right, go at the right pace I'm not going to miss this serve. I can go let's say 40% power and the ball is going to drop in the box. I don't need any spin to really help that ball to drop because I'm going at a speed that's allowing gravity to kick in. The ball is just naturally going to drop in the box. So if you can control your speed it's going to go a long way to preventing you from hitting double fault and you know this is all about you keeping your form as well because there's a lot of players who when they want that ball to go in the box it's a big second serve their whole stroke breaks down because they don't have the confidence to just swing and control what they're doing. They can't control their body and they can't control the tennis ball. Now as we get to the next level we're going to need spin on the tennis ball to allow us to attack the serve and still make it relatively safe. Now a top spin or kick serve is really going to make the ball dip over net because the ball is spinning forward but even just a regular slice serve is going to go a long way to getting that ball in the box. It's going to create drag air I'm not a scientist but this ball spinning will make the ball dip into the box far more than if the ball is just traveling with no spin. But the error players make is to think that they have to hit a top spin serve or a kick serve. Now that's great if you're at that level but if you can't hit a very good slice serve you really have no business trying to hit a top spin or a kick. A top spin or a kick serve is just a more advanced version of a slice serve. So first of all you've got to slice. You've got to feel like you can spin this tennis ball. It's also going to help on a first serve because you can really get that ball moving a lot easier on a slice serve than you can on a kick serve. On a kick serve you might get that ball to jump like two inches. On a slice serve you can just get this ball moving. I mean that's probably moved like four foot. So you've got to get familiar with spinning the tennis ball with any kind of spin and the most obvious one is slice. The first thing I want you to do is grab some tennis balls. Get yourself a chopper grip also known as continental. If you don't know what that is or how to get it check out this video that I did a couple of weeks ago. You might even want to move slightly eastern backhand with your grip because right now I want you to try and work some spin. I want it to be an experiment. How much spin can we put on this ball? And you can see I'm throwing it quite wide coming around it. Those balls aren't going to go out. I guarantee this ball is not going to go out. I'm just going to put a ton of spin on it and it's going to drop in the box. But right now it's not necessarily about you hitting a great second serve that's practical for a match. It's building up that understanding of how your racket can manipulate the tennis ball. Do you understand how to spin it? Can you throw it up and just spin that ball and have an understanding of how your racket manipulates the tennis ball? Because once you can do that, once you can build up the relationship between your racket and the ball, once you can control how hard you're hitting it, putting it in the box is not that difficult. Alright, so once you've worked the tennis ball and your ball looks like this, you've fluffed it up with all the spin you're hitting, I'd like to see you spinning that ball upwards a little bit. So rather than just coming around the ball, let's have a lot of spin. Let's see if we can spin the ball and just make sure that the second it comes off your racket it goes up so we get a little bit more net clearance. Now what may happen here is people start pushing the ball up and again this comes back to understanding your swing, having confidence in swinging at the right speed and having confidence in catching spin on the ball because if you start pushing that ball up it's going to go long unless you hit it very slow. So we need spin on the ball but now we're going to start spinning the ball high. I'm also not going to throw the ball quite so far out to the right. So I'm going to throw the ball sort of over my right shoulder, not too far over my head, but feel like I can spin the ball up from there. You can see a little bit more net clearance there. So that ball still has slice on it but because I'm hitting up on the ball it has a little bit of topspin. I'd say overall the ball is still going to move this way because it has more slice than topspin but that little bit of topspin from throwing the ball not so far to the right, throwing it over my head, tilting back a little bit and slicing up into the sky gives it enough topspin to arc the ball into the box. So an exercise that really helped me to develop a good kick serve and a very safe second serve was to aim for targets quite close to the net. That target is in between the net and the service line. So for me to hit that with any kind of speed I have to make sure that I hit up on the ball and it has topspin to dip the ball over the net and to land it that short. Once I've practiced that for a little bit aiming for the entire box seems pretty simple. So I'm going to give this a go. I'm going to feel like I hit up on the tennis ball and see if I can get it dropping as close to net as possible. That's obviously going to happen a little bit. Oh that was very short. That was right next to it. So getting that feeling that the ball is coming up off my racket is really what you need for a very very safe second serve and to get that ball to jump a little bit. Now when coaches do this exercise they'll have you kneeling down. That does the same thing, gets people to feel like they got to hit the ball up to create the spin. Sometimes I'll have people behind the fence here hitting the ball up over the fence. To get it over the fence they have to hit it up. But who wants to be kneeling down or hitting balls over fences? I think this is a good exercise to feel like you can arc it over the net and then when we take the cone out of that difficult position and we're aiming for the entire box hopefully we can take the net out of the equation and the top spin will always bring the ball back down. So now I've positioned the target in a more realistic position. It's about three or four foot away from any line. If I arc this ball over the net the ball should be three or four foot from the net. I'm not going to go near any danger and it should be a safe serve. Hopefully because I have confidence in not being near the lines or near the net I can attack it a little bit and if I can attack my spin serve I might be able to get it to kick. Okay nice and safe. Jump in. Oh got it. Almost twice. So the more confidence I have that the ball is not going to go out it's not going to go in the net because I'm brushing up on that thing the more I can attack it. So now I'm going to hit some serves from this side of the court. Now for me I don't usually try and hit a massive kick serve from this side. All I'm looking to do is make sure the ball gets over the net and in the box. I'm just trying to get enough arc on it that it makes it safe. Sometimes there's a little bit more slice from this side of the court than there will be from this side. From this side I tend to hit up and out a little bit more so get more spin whereas from here even though I'm hitting up on the ball I'm sort of coming around it a little bit more so it tends to have a bit more slice and a little less kick. But again I'm just trying to feel this ball make sure there's enough junk on it to get the ball over the net and in the box and make it safe. I want to be able to have the confidence to go at it and don't feel like it's going to fly on me. It's all right. Easy. Now I said I was going to talk about strategy. One thing I'm constantly telling my players is that once you've hit a double fault make your first serve an aggressive second serve so that you can get that second serve back on track. What you don't want to do is hit a double fault, miss your first serve and then be like oh my god I've got to hit another second serve. Manage the points. When you're hitting a lot of second serves, you're missing second serves, start putting more first serves in and make your first serve more similar to your second serve. The more similar they are the easier it is to go from first to second. People who struggle and they hit a lot of double faults their first and second serve are just very different and they're flip-flopping back and forth between these two very different serves. So again, manage the situation. Pete Sampras didn't do that. He'd hit two double faults, whack a first serve and then hit a second serve ace. For the rest of us, we have to make sure that we're managing these situations because one of my favorite sayings is your confidence takes the escalator up and the elevator down. It takes a long time to build confidence, doesn't take long to lose it. So manage those double faults, make sure you come back the following point. You can go big on that first serve, you can hit a first serve like a very aggressive second serve but if you miss it you'll have a better opportunity to make that second serve. All right, second serve 30-40, 5-all nasty. That was better than my target but hey, I got rewarded for being able to arc that ball. I want to leave you with a great story and something you should be doing when you're practicing your serves especially if you're just on your own practicing from the basket. I asked this woman to pretend she was serving like she was in a match because people generally throw it up, they whack it, no consequences but when they're in a match and there are consequences and it's a big point, they don't serve the same way. So I'm like let's practice like you're in a match, like you're in a point. So I see her standing there and she's focused. She looks way different than usually. She usually does when she's serving and she's getting ready to serve and I'm like okay what are you thinking like what's the score, what's the situation. She says it's 2-3, 30-40. I've just hit two double faults and my partner's pissed off with me. She hit a serve being an actress thinking about that situation and she hit it just like she would do in a match and that gave her an opportunity to get that sensation to understand how it feels when she's serving in a match and to try and practice in the same way and to execute those serves a little bit better because it's so different out here. You stand here just crushing stuff and then in a match like oh my oh my it's got to go in and then you end up pushing it. So be an actor, be an actress, visualize you're in a match and you'll have a better chance of creating that overlap between the coaching session, the practice session and match play.