Your Strokes:
Paul Goldstein: Serve
Analyzed by John Yandell
Working with a player at the world class level is the one of the most challenging and potentially gratifying experiences you can have as coach and student of the game. In this month's Your Strokes, we are going to take a look at part of the work I had the opportunity to do with men's tour player Paul Goldstein and his coach Scott McCain.
I'd seen Paul play at Stanford as part of the Dick Gould dynasty and actually been there to watch his team win a national championship. I'd also seen Paul around on the tour and also the challenger circuit when I was working with two of his Stanford national championship teammates, Jeff Salzenstein and Jim Thomas. (More on that in later articles.) Watching the tour results, I'd seen that Paul had made a run up the computer ladder, jumping from the top of the Challenger circuit onto the main tour and reaching the top 60. Having seen a lot of challenger and top 100 tennis first hand, I can tell you that is a more impressive accomplishment than you might assume.
But Paul and I hadn't really gotten to know each other until he called me about 3 months ago and asked me to do some video analysis with him on his service motion. It probably wasn't that big a secret on the tour that Paul's serve wasn't his greatest weapon. The question was, could he improve it and if so how?
We set out to try to answer those questions. After filming him for the first time at the San Francisco Tennis Club, I was pretty sure the answer was yes. I also had some ideas on how we might approach that.
One positive aspect of the experience was getting to collaborate with Paul's tour coach, Scott McCain. Scott is an ex-Cal star whom I had also seen play some memorable college matches. He's regarded as one of the most knowledgeable technical coaches on the tour, and he and I had spent some time one day at the U.S. Open a few years ago studying some of our high speed footage of Pete Sampras. In fact, we were able to use some of that footage of Pete's serve side by side with Paul.
When it came to Paul's motion, Scott and I found we were on basically the same page. In fact the video experience expedited some of the changes Paul and Scott had previously worked to implement. Seeing his motion for himself and in comparison with other top players was the catalyst that helped Paul actually incorporate them into actual match play. The camera also saw some other things that simply weren't apparent from watching Paul's motion with the naked eye.
As Paul said: "The biggest thing was being able to see my serve for myself and compare it side by side with some of the best players in the world. That was so powerful. To me it was far more persuasive than anything anyone could ever say to me about it, no matter how much they might know."
When I set up the camera to film a player's serve, I almost always start filming from behind the player. This is because I believe that the most basic element to look for in any motion is the racket path upward to the ball. That turned out to be key with Paul.
In the past, I've written extensively about what I call the pro racket drop position. (Click Here.) Unless the racket drops fully down with the tip pointing at the court, it will not be able to travel directly upwards to the ball. Instead it will take a diagonal path to the ball partially across the player's back. In the drop position, the racket doesn't "scratch the back" as is still commonly believed. Instead, it hangs directly down along the player's right side. The shaft and the tip of the racket point directly down at the court. The plane of the face of the racket is at about a 90 degree angle to the plane of the torso.
In my opinion a full racket drop is the primary power source in any motion. You see it in all the top players with explosive deliveries: Sampras, Roddick, Greg Rusedski, Wayne Arthurs. The list goes on. The first thing the video showed about Paul was that he wasn't really achieving this position. We could see that that his racket drop was maybe around 80% of the top players. At the lowest point, it was still at a diagonal to the court. It's a very common problem at every level of the game.
So the question for Paul was the same as for many other players I have worked with, from lower level recreational players, to college players, to tour players. How can the racket drop be increased? I think the answer has to do with two factors: the shape of the wind up, and the flexibility of the shoulder joint of the player. Does all this sound familiar? Right these are the same questions we addressed for our subscriber Phil Picuri in Your Strokes two months ago. (Click Here.)
There is no doubt that some version of the abbreviated backswing is dominant at the pro level. Andy Roddick is the most extreme example. But you can see some version in the motion of virtually every player on the tour. This is in contrast to the older style pendulum or circular windup. In the pendulum windup the racket tip traces the circumference of a circle as it moves down, back, and up. The arm and racket point more or less directly toward the back fence before the elbow starts to bend and raise the racket. In the abbreviated motions, at some earlier point the player uses the deltoid or shoulder muscles to pick up the racket and raise the tip to the traditional power position. The great Pete Sampras is the classic example of a moderately abbreviated windup.
One of the only top players who currently uses the full circular motion is Mark Phillippoussis. This was also windup used by the great John McEnroe. So what's the difference? Does the shape of the wind up really matter? In my opinion the answer is probably no, so long as the windup delivers the racket to the full drop position.
The problem is that achieving this position with an abbreviated windup appears to require much more shoulder flexibility. You can see this incredible flexibility is the video of almost any great server, but take a look at this video of Wayne Arthurs. To position the racket at the full drop Wayne rotates his upper arm backwards in the shoulder socket. It's amazing and a little frightening to watch. That's called external rotation.
Paul's shoulder didn't appear to be touched by god in quite the same fashion. In his case the abbreviated motion appeared to be restricting rather than facilitating a full racket drop. So the first step was to experiment with the backswing to see how it might affect this critical element. This is where the process got really interesting.
I showed Paul the video of the wind up of Philippoussis. Then I had him to the exact same exercise I recommended for Phil: to swing the arm and racket in a full circle from the shoulder. The idea here was not that Paul was going to totally transform his motion to a circular windup. The idea was that by moving his motion toward the freer, circular pattern we would see an increase in the racket drop. This exercise is an "overcompensation." By practicing a more extreme version of the change you are trying to make, you move the existing motion a few increments in a positive direction.
I can't say that Paul was wildly and completely enthusiastic about doing it, because it does seem a somewhat bizarre request to make of a top 100 player. At that moment he may have questioned whether I really had any idea what I was doing. If so, he was too polite to mention it. But he gritted his teeth and let his arm and racket fly around the circle a few times. Then I asked him to hit some more actual serves and visualize his wind up actually traveling along that circular path.
I detected a boost in my credibility, because the change was virtually immediate. Rather than taking the racket out to the side and then up and back, Paul's backswing expanded with the motion of the arm and racket moving much more downward and backward before going up. In the video we could definitely see an incremental increase in his racket drop, with some serves appearing to reach very close to the deep position of Sampras et al.
Here's the interesting part. Even though we modeled Philippoussiss, the shape of the motion actually looked like Pete. The sequence was: Start with an extreme abbreviated windup. Model an extreme pendulum wind up. End up half way in between and look like Pete Sampras. Over time, this motion produced more and more examples of near perfect and perfect racket positions at the drop.
If you looked at the angle of his shoulder turn, he was definitely turning away from the ball further. In addition the distribution of weight in his stance was also more even like Pete's. Previously as his knee bend deepened Paul had the tendency to stand up on the toes of the front foot.
Interestingly, these were some of the same changes Paul and Scott had spent time trying to implement previously, before a mild shoulder strain had shortcircuited the process. Why did these changes occur simultaneously and almost automatically? That I can't say. Possibly looking at the video of Pete, Paul just absorbed something. But it does go to show that strong technical elements tend to go together naturally. It may be that feeling a better racket drop was the prerequisite for putting the other elements together.
To tell the truth I didn't really care how it happened, I was just happy that it did. As were Paul and Scott. As we looked at the video I think we were all amazed and how great his motion looked. I also felt that by giving Paul a strong mental image of the changes in his positions, as well as a physical feeling to go along with that, there was a much greater chance he'd be able to hang on to the adjustments in his motion and use them in match play.
That in fact turned out to be true. I had a chance to watch Paul in action at the SAP Open in San Jose where he went all the way to the finals in doubles with partner Jim Thomas, losing in a third set Super TieBreaker to grey panther and living legend John McEnroe and his partner Jonas Bjorkman. I also saw him split sets with Andre Agassi and Lleyton Hewitt at Las Vegas and Indian Wells.
We'll look at all that in terms of his serve in the next month's Your Strokes. We'll also see how the initial changes led naturally to the reexamination of still other elements,and to further technical improvements. The whole story is instructive because it really givesall players a sense of the incremental and progressive nature of change--even at the world class level.