Your Strokes: Kyle Doppelt Serve Contact Point

A smooth motion, a heavy ball, but contact behind.

The development, improvement, and/or correction of a stroke, even your best stroke, is a process that moves in stages.  That’s not how most people believe it happens though.  “Just tell me what to do and I’ll do it–problem solved,” is the way most players think.  This approach leads to a lot of frustration, and usually, limited change.  (For more on this whole issue on how learning actually happens, check out the classic lesson this month, Myth of the Tennis Tip, Click Here.)

In Your Strokes for February we’ll look at an example of someone who did it the right way, Kyle Doppelt.  We’ll follow the exact steps he used to correct a difficult problem on his serve, currently one of the better serves in Ivy League college tennis. The problem had to do with the position of his contact point–a problem that is also epidemic at lower levels of play.

I first had the pleasure of meeting Kyle over two years ago, when he was already playing varsity tennis at Cornell.  He wanted to work on his entire game, but one of the biggest changes we made was actually to his…