Your Strokes:
Vin Miller Serve

Analyzed by John Yandell

This month is Your Strokes, we take a look at the serve of Vin Miller. I think you'll agree from looking at the animations that Vin is an athlete! He's looks scary strong and he's pretty explosive. I know from his emails and posts in the Forum that he is a student of the game with a real passion for tennis and improving his level. Over the last couple of months I've enjoyed discussing some of the finer points of serving technique with him, mainly the racket path, wrist movement, pronation, and leg action.

The funny thing is, when I convinced him to send in this serve video and I actually got to take a look, all that discussion seemed completely irrelevant. The irony is that in all our discussions he never mentioned what seemed critical to me when I saw the video.

If you've read many of my posts in the Forum, you've probably come across a response something like: "Send in the video, now." It may seem like a cop out, but really I'm just trying to avoid wasting time and energy, or worse, giving advice that will be counterproductive.

In the Tennisplayer articles we have the advantage--we can write about the top players referring directly to amazing imagery of virtually any stroke and/or technical issue. That's one of the whole points of Tennisplayer--to get us from the land of speculation to the land of reality. But in trying to help our subscribers with their strokes, we are literally flying blind. My experience over a lot of years has been that most players can't accurately describe what they do in words, and often what they think are the critical issues, aren't.

So what did I see? First, the good news. Vin has a live arm and a fantastic racket drop. He reaches the full drop position with a low elbow position, which indicates he has a naturally flexible shoulder. If you read the Roddick serve articles you may remember that one unique element is how Andy comes to the ball from the outside, or slightly from his right. It's hard to tell exactly from the video, but Vin appears to have a little bit of that going on too. That's great! I'd be very happy to have that myself. You can't coach it, and it's the basis for natural racket head speed most players won't achieve no matter how perfect their technique.

But if we look at his motion closely, we can see that there are some fairly severe technical problems limiting his ability to get the most out of his serve. There is a cluster of interrelated elements to look at: his ball toss, his contact position, and what the combination forces him to do with his torso during the motion.

On the side to side axis, Vin's ball toss and his contact point are positioned to the far left. A left contact point in and of itself isn't necessarily negative. In fact, we've seen that the great servers like Sampras and Roddick have ball positions to the left. But Vin's is too extreme. Since we don't have a straight on front or rear view it's hard to tell precisely where it is, but it's definitely too far--it might be further left than Pete's!

What's worse is that the toss is not only too far left, it's also quite far behind. If we look at the contact points of the good servers, they are all slightly in front of the plane of the body. Vin's contact point is behind the edge of his body, basically over the top of his head.

To hit the ball from this position, look at what he has to do with his torso! First, watch how he bends back from the waist at the start of the motion. Then look at the arch is his back as he starts to go up to the contact. And before you say, "Wait, all the top players do that," the fact is no, they don't. The incline in the torso comes from the bend in the knees. I know the Sonic Serve theory, that the left hip should jut out and forward, and to a certain extent, that's true. But again, this comes naturally from the knee bend. (Check out the Sampras articles in Tour Strokes if you want to read more on that.) Max Mirni may be the exception, but I still think it's a technical flaw. You don't see the majority of serves with an angle between the torso and the hips at the knee bend.

Ironically, I think Vin's athleticism actually works against him here. I haven't seen too many players who can actually get into the positions he goes through to hit the ball. The end result is that he rotates too far and too soon. He lands with his torso tilted severely to the left side. The rear leg is pulled around and so it doesn't kick back behind him. It kicks to the side.

What Vin really wants is to be more like Roger Federer, straight up and down from the waist, making contact in front, (but still somewhat to the left), and then landing in perfect balance with the back leg kicking back. We've done a lot of power serve analysis on the site--Sampras, Roddick, et al. You see these elements in their motion. But the player who executes them most perfectly is Federer. For most people Federer is a great and more realistic model--and he serves pretty well too, don't you think?

So the obvious solution would be to say, "OK Vin, just throw the ball a little more to the right and more in front. Then you'll look just like Roger--except maybe with a better racket drop!"

Unfortunately, it's not quite that easy. Altering the contact point on the serve is actually one of the more difficult problems in coaching. It sounds strange but to change the toss you first have to change the contact point and the body position. Otherwise, the feeling for the contact point is just too strong and it just over powers everthing else. I've seen players actually change their toss and then move their bodies to the right and up underneath the ball and actually just recreate the old contact--and a foot fault usually as well. It's a chicken and egg deal. So the surgery needs to be a little more radical--the model here is take 3 steps back to take 5 steps forward. To do this Vin needs to learn the contact point and the body position on the serve over again, from scratch.

This means learning to hit standing completely still with perfect posture, a perfect contact point, and no leg drive. By forcing himself to maintain this radically different body alignment, Vin will in turn be forced to adjust his toss--that is if he wants to make contact with the ball. Otherwise it'll be a swing and a miss.

In formulating this plan for correcting a difficult case, I took the liberty of a consultation with Dr. Kerry Mitchell, head Teaching Pro at the John Yandell School. Together we came up with the exercises he'll need. When we say we want him to stand still, that's really what we mean. I mean really mean.

The animation shows a sure fire way to do this, simply by putting another racket across the back foot. The rule is, you CANNOT move the front foot or leave the court. When you serve from this stationary stance, the back hip and foot will naturally rotate and the racket will be gently bumped off. If it lands 4 feet away, guess what that means? Right, your serve is not improving... Live with the 50mph ball you will produce. Your enemies won't be watching.

Once this stance is established, Vin will have no choice but to toss differently, and also, to stand up straighter. If he still tries to throw it too far left, he'll be thrown off balance at contact and have to move his feet. This is also a great exercise, by the way for improving the consistency of your toss. It really has to be precise, because there is very little room for compensation.

The idea is to stand straight up and down from the waist and force yourself to adjust the toss to the contact point. Watch in the animation how Kerry is standing so straight up and down. The contact point is in front and still slight to the left.

There is now one final step that will allow Vin to reintroduce his leg action without reverting to the previous toss and contact point. We noted that his toss was causing him to land off balance and his rear leg to spin around too soon. When he goes back to the knee bend, he needs to practice landing on the front foot, with the back leg kicking back. Literally. If you really are on balance, you can land on the left foot, and stop right there, standing relatively straight up and down with the back leg pointing backwards toward the back fence. It's a great exercise for anyone to practice better posture on your serve. If Vin can catch himself in this position, it shows he really has incorporated the changes. So Vin, good luck and keep us posted.