In my last piece, we covered the basics of the serve placement, emphasizing the three target areas for the serve (Alley, Body, Center) and how much risk you should take on your serve at different stages of the match.

I also told readers that a server has to think like a baseball pitcher. You have to use off-speed pitches and move the ball around to throw off the batter or the receiver for that matter. Because if you keep coming with the fastball, sooner or later they're going to get grooved on it.

In this piece, I’m going to cover spin. I believe it’s critical that everyone develop some mastery over spin to become an effective server and that club players should spin 60-70 percent of their serves during a match.

Service Grips

There are two types of grips used to serve and induce spin, the Continental forehand and the Eastern backhand.

Continental Forehand

For club players, the Continental forehand is a more neutral and natural grip and minimizes the grip change for executing the serve and volley. When teaching serving with spin, I usually have players start off using a Continental grip and gradually have them start trying the Eastern backhand grip.

The Continental Grip (left) is a more natural feeling grip, however, most of the great servers, including Pete Sampras, prefer the Eastern Backhand Grip.

Eastern Backhand

The Eastern backhand grip has been used by the game’s best servers, including Pancho Gonzales and Pete Sampras.

The Eastern backhand grip enables you to hit with more pronounced sidespin or topspin, yet also allows you to hit a flat, hard serve (as Pancho's and Pete’s serves amply demonstrate).

Sidespin and the Serve

To hit a sidespin or slice serve consistently, I recommend that (right-handed) club players toss the ball to their right, as striking the ball in this position helps most players impart sidespin. (Yes, some professionals can hit a flat serve or slice serve when the ball toss is in the same position, but this is a very difficult skill to master).

When learning this serve, most players underestimate how far to the right their toss must be to consistently hit a slice serve. So when you first try this, exaggerate your toss to the right so you can get a sense for this ball toss and service motion.

Strike the ball at the three o’clock position, which will cause the ball to have sidespin and make it run away from the person when it lands in the court. You’ll hear a ripping sound as you add slice, as opposed to the solid ponk when you hit a flat serve.

Make sure your eyes stay on the ball, because that’s your target, not the court. In terms of where the ball is going to go, the cause is the striking of the ball in a particular way, the effect is where it lands in the court.

To remember to keep your head up and focused on the ball, use the rhyme, “keep your eye on the sky.”

If you want to hit to the Body (yellow) zone (see graphic above), aim for the Center zone. Just like a curve ball in baseball, the ball will curve and land in the Body zone. Just like in baseball, this curving motion makes it more difficult for the receiver to track and anticipate the speed and eventual landing place of the ball. To place your serve into the Alley (red) zone, aim for the Body zone. The ball will break away from the player, pulling them into the alley or outside the court. With the player pulled wide, my strategy is to drive the ball deep into the open court and then put away an easy volley winner.

Topspin and the Serve

When you hit a topspin groundstroke, your ball travels higher over the net, increasing your safety margin, and the spin on the ball brings it back into the court. The same principle applies to the serve. To hit a topspin serve, toss the ball directly over or even slightly behind your head. This ball position helps players brush up against the ball, going from the 7 o’clock position through the 1 o’clock position, which imparts topspin to your serve.

You can hit a topspin serve without worrying about executing a kick-serve, which has an exaggerated topspin motion, and therefore “kicks” up when it lands.

A topspin serve simply helps you hit a serve that clears the net by a wide margin and therefore will bounce high in the service box. So don’t leave the topspin serve out of your service repertory simply because you can serve a kick or American twist serve. The topspin serve gives you the change of pace and high ball bounce that will throw our opponent off-balance.

Height of the Serve

Hit up on the ball! When players miss their serve, it’s more often because they’ve hit into the net as opposed to hitting it long.

The primary cause is players hitting too many hard, flat serves, not giving themselves enough safety margin over the net.

We’ve all been told you must hit up on your serve, but do you know why? It’s a matter of physics. Unless you’re well over 7 feet tall, you can’t hit a perfectly flat serve into the service box.

If the serve follows a straight line from the top of a server’s racquet to the service box, the ball will land out.

To help players truly grasp the principle of hitting up on their serve, I find an excellent drill is asking them to serve from several feet behind the fence of your court and attempt to serve. At first, players think it’s impossible, but as they try, they see they can hit up on the ball and land it in the service box in the next court. To overcome their disbelief, I even kneel while I’m serving behind the fence. With twenty years of practice behind me, I can usually land a serve in within three attempts.

Visualizing Height.

Given the principle, “you can only hit what you see,” we need to visualize how high we need to serve. To help players see their height target, I use what we call the magic window, a 3 foot by 3 foot’ square that starts at the height of the net and goes up to 6 feet. That’s your serving window.

If I want to successfully hit a flat serve, I must serve within the 9 square feet of that window. Does that sound difficult? You bet, that’s why if you’re serving primarily flat serves, I can almost guarantee your serving percentages are low.

One of the reasons you increase your serving percentage by using sidespin or topspin is that you can hit through a larger window. With sidespin the width of window expands, as you can hit to one side of the window and still get the ball into the service box. With topspin, you can hit higher than the 6 foot height of the magic window and still get your serve in.

Trying to hit through this little 3’ by 3’ box is intimidating to players, so I usually recommend trying to do this from the service line. I will even have the players kneel as I’m doing to give them both the feeling of hitting up and visualizing the appropriate height over the net.

Wrap-Up

Your goal in serving should be to hit 60-70 percent of your first serves in, and of course to minimize your double-faults. The way to reach this goal is to use serves that spin, either sidespin (slice) or topspin.

The spin serve gives your greater control over serve placement while providing a greater safety margin over the net. Spin also helps you change the pace of the ball, thereby increasing the effectiveness of your hard, flat serves.

So what's the bottom line here? If you want to improve your game and become a more consistent server, spin should become the foundation of your service game.