Your Strokes: Jelena Jankovic: Serve

How good is Jelena’s serve?  Could moving toward the male serving model make it better?

This month I’m once again giving into popular demand and bringing back Your Strokes, and this time with quite an interesting subject, Jelena Jankovic’s serve.  One of the emerging issues in coaching and teaching now is the technical difference in the men’s and women’s  games, and particularly the serve.  The women in generally use different stances, much less body rotation, and have different contact points than the men. 

The question is: why?  Possibly it’s a case of the physical differences, particularly in the upper body structure.  Maybe women players are actually maximizing their ability with a certain technical style better suited to female physicality.

The Male Model?

Yet many of the better women servers have motions that are at least somewhat closer to those of the men.  And one of the great women’s players in recent history, Justine Henin, remodeled her motion based on video of Pete Sampras, transforming her serve from a liability to one of the best in the women’s game–despite her height.

So let’s look at Jelena’s motion and compare it to some of the top men.  She’s a tremendous athlete, obviously….