The Overhead

Usually we associate great overheads with attacking players.

Whether you're a great net player, a strict baseliner, or somewhere in between, a good overhead should be an essential part of your game. If you think of the great players of our game both past and present who also had great overheads, many of you would list aggressive players like Pete Sampras, John McEnroe, or even Rod Laver.

Many of you might not put Andre Agassi in that group, reasoning that he is a baseliner and doesn't need a great overhead. But John McEnroe himself has said many times that Andre's overhead is one of the best, if not the best in the history of the sport. If you think about the top players today, both the men and the women, you won't find one who doesn't have a great overhead, no matter their game style.

If it is crucial to them in their game why isn't crucial to improve yours? If you get a chance to hit an overhead the point should be over in most cases. It's true for the pros and it should be true for you too. The overhead is a put away shot. If yours isn't then, then you are giving away what should be free points.

A baseliner with one of the best overheads ever.

The key to improving your overhead is understanding, learning, and practicing a few essential elements. Those essential elements include: the unit turn, movement (footwork), and the arm swing.

Before I start discussing the three elements, I want to stress again, as I have done in previous articles, (Click Here) the necessity to learn and to use the continental grip around the net, on the serve, and on the overhead. The continental grip, along with a good unit turn as described next, is what allows greater racket acceleration and therefore ball speed.

Although the overhead is like the serve in obvious ways, in one basic way it is more like the groundstrokes or volleys. This is because it begins with a unit turn.

On the serve, the player starts stationary with his feet and shoulders already sideways or at least partially sideways to the net. On the overhead, the player generally is starting from a ready position. This means he must first turn and achieve this sideways alignment. Not making this initial move is a fundamental problem for many players who start moving to the ball first. Without a good unit turn your overhead will never have power or consistency.

The turn sideways with the feet and torso within the first steps.

This unit turn on the overhead has two related parts: the movement of the feet and the movement of the torso. Watch in the animations how quickly the players turn sideways. The players start in the ready position with the shoulders facing the net and the tips of the toes pointing more or less straight ahead. Bascially they turn completely sideways within the first two to three steps.

The step pattern differs depending on where the player is on the court, and where the lob is hit. But the result is basically the same. At the end of the unit turn, the tips of the toes are pointed sideways at the sideline. The torso has turned usually 90 degrees, until it is square with the net.

A good key to use when learning this position is to point your front shoulder blade toward the ball. If the ball were to fall all the way it would hit the player on the front shoulder blade.

The big difference in the unit turn compared with the forehand, of course, is that as you turn on the overhead, the arms start rise upwards above the shoulders.

The arm points up with the racket slightly past trophy position.

But the wind up here is not identical to the serve. Unlike the serve where players usually drop the racket arm at least initially in the wind up, the arm motion is directly upward. The overhead wind up motion is actually more similar to the super abbreviated serve windup of a player like Andy Roddick than it is to most serve windups, probably including yours. So don't make another critical mistake of using a long circular motion.

After the windup starts upwards, it continues until you are in a position resembling the trophy position on the serve. I say resembling, because there isn't an exact match. Typically the player's left arm will be pointed directly upward similar to the service toss, but sometimes it's even higher. And it can be substantially lower when the time is short.

Also, the racket is often further along in the motion. In the classic trophy position, the racket tip points directly upward with the arm in an L shape at the elbow. On the overhead, however, the players have usually begun the racket drop, rotating the upper arm backwards, so the racket is pointing more sideways toward the sideline.

The amount of time you have on the overhead is another big difference with the serve. The timing of serve is the same with every ball, controlled by the toss height. Because players are hitting a moving ball on the overhead, the timing can be very quick, or take up to several seconds. The exact position of the arms varies with this timing.

Sometimes when the time interval is very short, the left arm extends less than a serve. If the players have a large distance to cover, however, they may hold the racket longer in something closer to the classic serve trophy position as they move, before beginning the racket drop when they reach to set up position.

More weight on the back foot sets up the jump overhead.

Another difference compared to the serve is the distribution of your weight at the time the left arm extends. If you can get set, then the weight will be more balanced between the feet. This can be similar to the serve. But if you are moving backwards, your weight will typically be more on the rear foot. This is what makes the jump overhead possible when the players are moving back and then launch themselves upward to the hit by pushing off the back foot.

Beyond these technical differences in the preparation, the biggest difference with the serve is that the player must move to the ball. How a player moves his/her feet to position themselves on any shot is key to achieving great success in your game. But on the overhead the footwork is especially important and can be the difference between having no overhead and a having a very good on.

Cross steps allow a player to keeo the body sideways.

On the groundstrokes players with good hands can sometimes get away with bad movement and still make a decent shot, but the overhead is a different story. Unlike the serve which is hit from the same position on the court every time, the ball on the overhead is moving toward your side of the court. You can hit an overhead from literally anywhere on your side of the net. The ball is also descending from a much greater height than the serve toss. This is important because as the ball drops, it accelerates due to gravity. For these reasons it is vital to be ready when the ball passes through the hitting zone.

The ability to use Carioka Steps, or what I call cross steps, is the key to moving upward and back. These steps can also be used to move on diagonals across the court when the player needs to move sideways at the same time.

If you want to maximize your ability to move on most overheads, do not rely only on shuffle steps. This is where most players make their first mistake. Shuffling is an inefficient way of moving either forward or backward. There are many instances where you will see a great player shuffle back or forward to hit an overhead, but usually it is on a ball where they have a not of time, and/or not much movement either forward or back is required.

They come into play on all the shots in the game at certain times. (Click Here to read Michael Friedman analysis of their role in the groundstrokes and approaches.) They are just especially critical on the overhead.

Mastering the ability to rotate your body and then use these crossing steps will increase your speed reaching the ball, and your power on the overhead. The tough thing about gaining this ability is to be able to do it with the arms moving upwards into the air.

The cross steps facilitate rapid, efficient backward movement.

The key to moving backward, is to take a cross step backward with the front foot toward the baseline. So the front foot actually crosses over the rear foot in this first move.

In many ways, the best way to practice this crossstep movement is without the ball. Put yourself into the turn position with your arms up and move backward with the front foot crossing in front of the rear foot. Keep practicing it until you can run at full speed and still feel secure in your balance.

Each time you land the rear foot, place slightly more weight on it and relax the knee a bit. That little bit of weight on that leg is important because that is the leg you push off of for the jump overhead.

As you get more confident with this movement you can experiment with jumping from the back leg to make the upward motion more explosive. Most good players do this on most overheads because they are moving back at the time of the hit to deal with the lob attempts of opponents.

On the bounce overhead, players move with crosssteps then shuffle steps.

Even on a bounce overhead, the crosscourt movement is usually crucial to getting into position quickly Even when you get what seems like a relatively easy overhead, get into the habit of taking that initial backwards cross step. You will be amazed how fast and far back you can get using the correct footwork.

The key to forward movement is similar to the backward movement. When they have any significant difference to cover, the players will use the cross step pattern.. Now the first step is forward with the rear foot.

The side on which the rear foot crosses the front foot depends on whether the player is moving forward to the left or right. When the player moves to the right and forward the rear foot will cross to the right side of the front foot. When moving left and forward, the rear foot will cross to left side of the front foot In each case though, the rear foot is stepping towards the net.

The crossstep pattern is the same for forward movement.

Sometimes there is a combination of cross stepping and shuffling after the cross step, depending how far or how fast the player has to move, but the first reaction with your feet is the key. The cross step is what facilitates and maintains the unit turn as a player moves to position for the lob.

The first step to creating a great arm swing, as in all the shots, is creating the turn position with your feet and torso as described above. Facing the net too much as you prepare for the overhead will restrict acceleration of the racket head. The second step is a good racket drop. As with the serve, the racket falls along the side of the torso with the tip pointing more or less straight down at the court.

The arm swing on the overhead is similar in some ways to the arm swing on the modern serve, and in other ways it is different. At times the amount of the racket drop on the overhead can be somewhat less than on the serve. This is because the extreme leg drive on the modern serve can increase the external rotation of the shoulder backwards, and therefore, increase the lowest point the racket reaches at the bottom of the drop. It's not something worry about if your arm is just relaxed and you let the racket fall.

The racket drop is along the side but not always as deep as the serve.

In some respects the movement up to the ball is also the same. The arm motion to the ball begins with the straightening of the elbow and then continues with the turning of the hand to square the racket. These are the same basic mechanisms as the serve.

But there are two differences. First, as we noted above, you position yourself for the overhead so that, if the ball dropped, it would land on your right shoulder. This position means that the contact point is noticeably more to the right compared to the serve.

The reason for is that the overhead is usually hit flatter than the serves hit by the same players. Also, because the player is around the service line or even closer, the arc of the shot is more downward into the court.

For these reasons, there is often less pronation or turning of the hand and racket during the upward swing. The racket can come through the shot and followthrough with the racket face pointing straight down. This seems to be related to the direction of the shot. When the players want to hit the ball shorter with a higher bounce, typically when they are closer to the net, the motion tends to have less pronation. It may related to the angle of the placement.

The overhead contact point is further to the side than the serve.

If you have a good, relaxed service motion, you shouldn't have to think about all this too much and it will probably happen naturally as a result of your shot choices. Note how, regardless of the pronation, the followthrough continues forward, out, and across the body in the animations.

Overall what makes the overhead difficult is the ability to move in position with the proper turn position. The unit turn and the movement, I believe, are the two areas where the average player needs to focus. The arm swing is important, but as your serve arm swing improves in this area so will your overhead swing. As I mentioned above, conquering the ability to do the cross steps as you initiate the turn will go a long way in making the overhead the best part of your game.

There is a great live ball overhead drill/game that I have used many years with my high school doubles teams to work on implementing the overhead in matches. One team is back at the baseline and one team is at the net. Your coach or one of the back players starts the point by lobbing the net players. The lob feed should not be too tough or too easy. The net players cannot let the ball bounce either on the lob or the volleys.

The amount of pronation varies with court position and shot placement.

After the lob is hit the point is live. The baseline players can do anything they want--lob, hit, go to the net, etc. First team to five points wins. Then everyone rotates (clockwise) one position and the game starts again. Rotating the positions gives the players practice from both halves of the court, which is important because of the differences in the angles. It's a great way to just get completely comfortable with hitting overheads everywhere on the court. Even if you are a singles player, it gives you the repetitions and the variety of movement and positions on the court that you need.

If you haven't really developed an overhead this game can be difficult at first because so many of the overheads are hit while moving back. It's the best way I know of to develop those critical cross steps. You'll know you are getting better when the team hitting the overheads starts to win the majority of the games.

The Overhead

Kerry Mitchell