Fix Your Pickleball Serve in 5 Steps

Power, depth, and reliability. These are three things that every great serve needs. So in this video, I'm going to show you a simple five-step progression so that you can achieve these things with your serve. I'm John Sincola, a professional player on the PPA Tour. I've coached everyone from beginners to touring pros, and I created the Winner's Circle to help players break through their plateaus and start winning the matches they should be winning. Okay, so in order to achieve these three things in our serve, there's a few fundamentals that we're going to have to follow. Number one is we need to use the bigger muscles to create the power. So we need to tap into the legs, the core, and the rotation to create the power. Number two, we need our paddle and our body to move together. A lot of inconsistency comes from when the paddle is just kind of swinging on its own and the body's not moving along with. And then number three is we need to eliminate timing issues. So we need to get rid of any sort of flipping in the swing or rolling over. Those are all timing based things that if you get a little bit wrong, it's going to result in big misses. So here's how we're going to achieve all three of those. Okay, for step one of this, we're just going to shadow through the movements, the basic movements that we want to feel. And you can follow along with me and kind of go through this. We want to get a sense of what we want to do first before we introduce a ball because that allows you kind of complete control to focus on how your body's moving and what you're doing. So you're looking at me right down the target line here. Here's the baseline. What I want you to do is I want you to stand kind of perpendicular to the baseline. So we're going to be starting sideways. Our goal for this is we're going to try to combine two things which seemingly don't really fit together, but we're going to try to get a linear swing with our arm while our body is rotating. Okay, that's how we're going to get both power from the body, but control from the arm. If I swing too much just around my body, then I'm going to be too timing based and kind of lose the ball in any direction. So here's how this is going to work. We're going to start sideways. You're going to start by turning just your chest to face the target. So you're my target right now. Both hands are together, paddle hand and off hand. We're going to turn so that our chest faces away sideways, and we're going to put our paddle straight back behind us. Okay, and now if you just allow your arm to kind of swing right down your target line like this, just almost like across your chest, you're going to notice as it gets, it's going to bottom out right about here, and as it starts to approach here, it's going to start to lift more. So we're going to allow that natural lift. That's what's going to create our topspin. Step one is to get that turn paddle, go straight back. Now we're going to go linear, straight down the target line until you can't reach anymore. You can't reach anymore. By this point, your chest should be facing back forward towards your target, and then once we get there and we're all out of reach, then we're going to continue to rotate our chest even further, and we're going to allow our back foot to step through. So all put together, it looks like this. We turn, we go straight down the target line, and then once we're kind of at full extension, then we rotate the rest of way through, and now my chest is pointing the opposite direction. So in a good swing like this, you're making a 180 degree turn. Your chest goes from facing this way to that way. So this is kind of the basics of the motion you want to feel, and I would suggest you do this a bunch of times until we can kind of do it naturally and feel like it's all one smooth motion. Okay, so now we got the general idea of what we want in the full motion. We're going to actually add a ball and start kind of piecing it all together. So this first part is called the drop and extend. So again, we're going to start perpendicular to our target line. So my target's right out there. I'm just going to start standing sideways. Same thing, I'm going to start with my paddle back, and I'm going to set my wrist. Okay, we want to get a little angle in this wrist set. You don't want it flat, and we don't want it too set, but just kind of a natural, maybe like a little less than 90 degree angle here in the wrist, laid, what we call laid back. So I'm going to get that all set back here, and the idea is that once we start this, this wrist position is not changing. That's a big factor of inconsistency. If we start flipping with the wrist, it's hard to get the ball to do the same thing over and over again. So we're going to set that. Our other arm is going to be out in front, again kind of on that straight line. We're going to drop the ball. We're going to let it bounce, and we're going to try to make a linear swing directly towards the target line, and then just stop it. And so you'll notice with these, you're probably not going to get a ton of power because we're not getting a ton of rotation yet, but we're just trying to get this feeling going straight down the target line. You should be able to get a little bit of top spin on these, and you should be able to hit this with a very consistent kind of spin, shape, and ball path, because ideally there's not a lot of moving parts to this right now. So give this a bunch of tries right down that target line. Hold your finish. Hold your wrist position, and look for that consistency. Okay, so now for part three. Pretty simple. We've got the setup. We've got the initial part. Now we're just going to add a little bit more finish to it. The key is we want the shoulders to finish. One of the big mistakes I see people make is when they're going to swing, they wrap the finish around just using the arm. And again, that's going to flip your paddle over. That's going to create inconsistency. So what we're looking is what we did last time. We get to that extended position. Once we get here, I don't want to feel like my arm's moving. I just want to feel like I turn everything through the ball. So again, it's not an arm. It's not a flip over. It's not a rollover. We're going to use the shoulders to rotate everything through. So we're going to go to extension, and now we're just going to add a finish. And you're going to notice that as you start to rotate, that's going to want to pull this back foot through a little bit. So now if I'm starting like this and my hips are facing here, and I'm trying to get my chest finishing that way, it doesn't really work. So we're going to allow that finish to kind of walk you through or pull your hip through a little bit. Okay, so here's what it's going to look like. And then as you go, if you get comfortable, you can start to speed things up a little bit. That's step three. Keep it linear as long as you can, and then add the shoulder rotation to get a little more speed and get that finish in there. This right here could be the solution to all of your grip problems. This is called a Trigger Grip Pro. What it does is it's just a little device that easily slides onto your paddle, and then you grip right over it. The idea is that it gives your trigger finger a spot to hold on to. The reason that's important is because the grip is one of the most important things in pickleball. If you don't start with a good grip, then nothing else matters. So what the Trigger Grip does is it makes sure that you get locked into the same spot on the paddle every single time. There's no guessing or confusion of if you're holding it correctly, or if you're in a different grip, or if you're switching it during a point. Once I grab this and lock that trigger finger in, I know that I'm holding it the same way every time for more consistency. And the great thing is it also works with your two-handed backhand, and it's tournament approved. So check out Trigger Grip Pro if you want to get one for yourself. Okay, so now for step four of this, we've got a good sense of what the upper body should be doing. So now we're going to add some lower body. This is going to smooth things out, going to add hopefully a little bit more power. So what we're going to do now, starting in that same position, instead of starting the paddle back, we're going to start both things forward. So paddle and ball together, and if you notice, all my weight is on my front foot right now. So we're going to focus on the weight shift and trying to get this all to kind of sync up together. So paddle and ball together, weight forward. When the paddle goes back, the ball is going to stay, and my weight is going to shift to my back foot. Okay, so now we end up in this position that we just practiced. Now as we start the forward swing, we're going to shift the weight back forward, and now we're back into basically step three and what we exactly practiced. Linear through the ball, go as long as you can, rotate finish, let the hip walk through. So here's what it all looks like. Forward, back, back forward. That's all we're going to do is just add that little bit of weight shift for step four. Try to get the body feeling like everything is kind of moving in good tempo and all moving and working together. Okay, so now that we got step four, step five is going to create some options. Okay, so we basically got a couple options here. We can hit what's called an open stance serve. We practiced everything like this, and then we walked through. Now technically, we could just start open to the court and make all the same movements. So the big difference would be that when I rotate, I'm kind of turning against my hips, but I'm getting to this same position with my upper body. I still work that same linear path, but now since I'm already starting open, I don't have to make that step through. I can just kind of turn through the ball. So that would look something like this. So that's going to be a little simpler as far as the footwork goes. There's less weight shift, less transitioning, and so if you're looking to just simplify, you can just turn and load linear and then turn through. You're going to finish at about the same position. Our second option would be to start in a similar position, but we're going to have to start back a little bit because we're going to take a step towards the court. In our practices, again, we're starting like this. We're going to start here now. Everything's forward, but now we're going to start it with a step that closes you into this position. So we're going to go closed and then we push off and go into just how we worked on it before. Okay, so here's what it would look like. Start forward, so we step, extend, and then again we've got that walk through like we were having in practice. And again, remember you're going to have to start a little bit farther back. The main advantage here is we're getting a little bit more forward momentum. So you're getting that body moving towards your target more, which can create a little bit more power. So those are your options. Try to go through all five of those and remember when you're practicing each of those five steps, don't move on to the next one until you really feel like you've mastered that last step. And if at any point you kind of lose the feel, go back to something simpler, master that, and then keep working back up. And hopefully you can get to this step five and really give yourself the options whether you want to work that open stance or the closed stance. Thanks for watching guys. I hope these tips helped. But if you want more guided and structured advice, make sure you click the link below and check out my brand new coaching community called The Winner's Circle. There's weekly live calls with me. There's monthly exclusive content that you can't get anywhere else. There's an extensive drill library and everything you need to level up your game.