Tour Strokes: Maria Sharapova Serve

Maria’s arm and racket rotate only halfway through the motion. What’s wrong with Maria Sharapova’s serve? It’s the rotation of the hand, arm and racket in the upward swing–or more precisely the inconsistency and the lack of that rotation. Top servers rotate the arm completely through the motion on every serve. Maria doesn’t. Her actual rotation is usually about half what it needs to be. It’s that simple. What is hand, arm and racket rotation? From the racket drop to the contact and out into the followthrough, the edge of the racket turns over roughly 180 degrees. This means that as the racket travels outward into the followthrough, the racket edge rotates counterclockwise until it is perpendicular to the court. It’s turned completely over. Compare this to Maria. On most serves, her rotation stops with the racket facing downward, basically parallel to the court–half what is normal is good serving. Sometimes Maria does complete the rotation, in fact, on around half of her first serves. But on her second serves–the source of her double faults–the percentage is much lower, more like 10 or 20%. So the fact is that on the majority of the serves she strikes, a critical biomechanical…