Kyle Doppelt:
Serve Contact Point

Analyzed by John Yandell

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 best shot, his big, lefty serve.  You can read about this in more detail in the Your Strokes we did at the time (Click Here).  The major changes then were in his stance, the sequence of his body rotation, and the heaviness of the ball he produced.

The changes were good enough to help propel Kyle to as high as the number one singles spot at Cornell, but last year he came back to San Francisco to do some additional work.  Despite his success, Kyle still felt his serve could be better, and I agreed.  And here is where we can see how the concept of working in stages really applies.

The first time we worked, Kyle learned to move his contact point further to his right (remember he’s a lefty).  This allowed him to improve the timing of his body rotation, hit more directly upward into the ball, and develop a heavier topspin component. 

We used Pete Sampras as a model, but we also used video of a top 100 pro player I was working with at the time, Jeff Salzenstein, another lefty who had made the same changes Kyle was working on, with tremendous positive result. (Click Here to see Jeff’s motion in the Interactive Forum.)

Kyle moved his serve dramatically toward this lefty version of high velocity, heavy serving.  But there was one issue that we saw from the beginning that remained problematic.  This was the position of his ball toss on the front to back axis.  We’ve seen in our analysis of all the top servers such as Roger Federer (Click Here) that, they toss the ball well out into the court. But after they explode upward and forward from the legs, the actual contact point is just at the front edge of the body.  Kyle’s contact was a few inches further back than that, roughly over the top of his head.  And in my experience, this is always one of the very toughest problems to correct.

Kyle’s motion was so smooth it was very hard to see this with the naked eye, or even watching the video at regular speed, but frame by frame analysis showed the contact point was consistently too far back.

We both felt at the time that this was robbing him of additional power, and also, possibly putting strain on his shoulder.  I think it’s hard to say for certain exactly what causes injuries, but Kyle did in fact go through a period where his shoulder gave him some problems and he had to put down the rackets for awhile.  So he had two good reasons for wanting to complete the transformation of his motion.

Process Not Information

And this is where the concept of the process came in.  Why not just adjust the toss by throwing it more in front and “solve” the problem?  Sorry but when you are dealing with the human body, the human brain, and complex biomechanical motions, it’s just not that easy.  And if you read this article (and the Myth article cited above) and still believe you can make important technical changes without continuous video feedback, well, that is the concept they call denial in psycho-therapeutic circles.

What Kyle needed to do was really isolate the feeling that goes with contact in front of the plane of his torso.  Without that he couldn’t change.  And, as I have found with many other players I’ve worked with on this same issue, finding that feeling is virtually impossible if the player tries to do this while executing his entire motion.

What was fabulous about Kyle was that he accepted this. Despite the fact that he could serve well over 120mph, he was willing to go back and reconstruct one element of his motion literally from the ground up.  And I mean literally.  That took some patience, humility and a sense of humor, and the fact that he had these at such a young age was one of the fun things about working with him.  (And yes, I’ve seen a few people of all ages, not so well disposed to the process…)

So Kyle began by simply standing still and hitting balls with his racket starting in the drop position.  Exactly the way I work with girls on my high school team or other young players who don’t have the feeling of the racket drop.  (Kyle was also nice enough to hit a few times with some players on my team, which they loved.)

The people watching us at Harbor Point and the San Francisco Tennis Club probably thought it looked crazy to see a Division 1 college player with a big serve doing this “beginning” exercise, and Kyle and I had a good laugh about that.

But I saw he was on his way, and the openness on his part was what made what followed possible.  Kyle had a great, flexible shoulder and a pro level drop, but working from this position allowed him to focus on one thing—moving from the drop to a completely different contact point.  Equally important, it gave the feeling of positioning the ball with his toss so that it was in front of his body where that contact point could actually happen. See it for yourself in the animation. 

But how to get it into his full motion?  How about just starting to hit his regular serve next and see if the contact improved?  Nope.  There were several more steps in this process along that way. 

The next step was to again stand completely still but use the full wind up and still make the new contact point.  Why was this phase important?  Because just going to the full wind up with no legs initially pushed his contact point back near the place where we had started.  But with a few repetitions he was able to once again create the position he wanted with contact in front of the plane of his body.

Now could he go to the full motion?  No again.  The biggest challenge was of course to launch into the court with the legs and still keep the contact in front.  So now we had to experiment with that.  I had Kyle go back to the racket drop position.  From there he could bend and launch and experiment with the toss.  Obviously, to make the new contact point he would have to toss even further in front. 

Because Kyle liked to play serve and volley, his motion naturally flowed forward after his landing, and this extra movement was another element that made it difficult to really consolidate the change. 

So again I used a drill I use with high school players and other lower level players, what I call the “hoppity hop.”

Instead of landing on his front foot and then taking the next step either forward to the net, or backward to recover, Kyle had to land on the front foot and keep his balance.  If he couldn’t stick the landing, he had to keep hopping forward on the front foot until he could completely control his balance.  And guess what?  Right, it took quite a few repetitions to do this and recreate the new contact point.  But he did.

Next we went to the hoppity hop, phase 2.  Now Kyle used the full wind up but still had to land and catch his balance on his front foot.  Again, with work, he was able to create and sustain the contact point in front.

Finally

OK, NOW he was ready.  We moved from the hoppity hop to the full motion.  And of course the same sequence ensued.  At first the contact moved back but with a few repetitions he began to find the new position hitting his first serve full out.  So the work paid off and the process worked.  Kyle was able to establish the contact point in the new motion, and then maintain it over time.  That meant a smoother, silkier motion, even more ball speed, and it had to be better for his shoulder.

Notice I said maintain it over time, and by maintain, I mean maintenance! And for Kyle maintenance meant repeating the multiple steps we had worked out and doing them everyday, every time he went on the court. 

Starting from the racket drop. Doing the full wind up standing still.  Launching from the racket drop. Doing the hoppity hops.  And then hitting those 120plus mph killer lefty bombs to anywhere in both boxes.  And we had a laugh about that too.  I think Kyle kind of enjoyed befuddling his teammates and opponents with his strange new serving rituals.  But I also know he enjoyed hitting the aces, and tje unreturnable serves, and the serves that set up volleys and short forehand winners even more.