Your Strokes: Esaam Ismail: Serve

A mismatch between the windup and the tossing motions, but a good racket drop.

Sometimes things just come together. Sometimes one thing leads to another naturally. Sometimes less input is more. And all those things happened when Esaam Ismail came to San Francisco to work on his serve.

As I almost always do, the first thing I did was film Esaam’s motion from the rear view, and then, after that, from the side. The rear view allows us see the racket drop and the timing and shape of the windup.

The sideview also shows the arms, but equally critically it shows us the contact point in relation to the plane of the body, as well as where and how far the player lands in the court.

It never ceases to amaze me the possible combinations of elements players use on their strokes. And the video showed that Essam’s serve was certainly an example of that. There were a lot of good elements, some critical flaws, and a pairing of techniques that were fine in and of themselves, but less likely to work well together.

When you do video analysis, however, the question is always this. After seeing the problems in…