Your Strokes: Kyle Doppelt Serve

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Kyle’s best shot, but with an extreme pinpoint.

Some of our subscribers know that I am a proud graduate of Yale University, but my Ivy League loyalties are now divided after my work with Cornell varsity player Kyle Doppelt. Kyle (and his charming mother Diane) spent a week in San Francisco earlier this summer. Besides taking them to Shalimar, the world’s greatest Indian/Pakistani restaurant, we made a lot of progress on Kyle’s attacking game.

Kyle moved to a more conservative forehand grip–the Federer 3 1/2 / 3. He found this allowed him to come forward on his returns and also to play up on the baseline off the ground. This meant he could better take advantage of his natural attacking instincts and solid technical volleys.

But probably the biggest changes we made were to his lefty serve, which he told me at the outset was his best shot. Kyle is tall and he hits the ball a ton. The first thing I looked for in the video was the pro racket drop position and Kyle had that naturally–the sign that he had the kind of shoulder flexibility it takes to develop a very…