Your Strokes: Phil Picuri Serve

Phil’s racket drop is about a 65 on a scale of 100.

This month’s Your Strokes features the serve of another one of our international subscribers Phil Picuri. Phil lives in Switzerland and is lucky enough to play on red clay at his club in Lugano–looks like one more great place in the tennis world I need to visit.

Phil is active on the site and posts regularly in the Forum. I like his posts because he asks concise, general questions about technique that I can answer by referring to our pro footage. Recently though he asked me specifically how to get a better racket drop on his own serve.

My answer was that I would have to see video of his motion, and he sent in this clip. As Phil told me, the video isn’t exactly broadcast quality. But I could see enough to have an opinion, and I have to agree with him about the racket drop. It’s incomplete. Maybe about a 60 or 65 on a scale of 100.

Phil’s serve is interesting because it points out one of the fundamental dangers in trying to learn something from studying the top players. The truth is sometimes you…