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Esaam Ismail: Serve

Analyzed by John Yandell

Sometimes things just come together. Sometimes one thing leads to another naturally. Sometimes less input is more. And all those things happened when Esaam Ismail came to San Francisco to work on his serve.

As I almost always do, the first thing I did was film Esaam's motion from the rear view, and then, after that, from the side. The rear view allows us see the racket drop and the timing and shape of the windup.

The sideview also shows the arms, but equally critically it shows us the contact point in relation to the plane of the body, as well as where and how far the player lands in the court.

It never ceases to amaze me the possible combinations of elements players use on their strokes. And the video showed that Essam's serve was certainly an example of that. There were a lot of good elements, some critical flaws, and a pairing of techniques that were fine in and of themselves, but less likely to work well together.

When you do video analysis, however, the question is always this. After seeing the problems in the motion, where should you start and what should you prioritize? And what you should leave alone, or leave alone at least initially?

As I have seen many times, sometimes changing one element leads unexpectedly to other changes. And if you are lucky and pick the right one, the cascade of subsequent events can be all good. This was definitely the case with Esaam.

Rear View

I always look first for the racket drop first in the rear view and when we checked Essam's was excellent—far better than most players I have filmed, even some at much higher levels. But the rear view showed something else very interesting.

Esaam had an abbreviated wind up, going directly up with his racket hand like Andy Roddick. But unlike Roddick who also takes the tossing arm directly up, Esaam dropped his tossing arm all the way down to the front leg more like Pete Sampras or Roger Federer.

Actually, his downward tossing arm motion was even more pronounced than Pete or Roger. Essam not only brought his arm all the way down, he brought it backwards past the inner edge of his front leg.

Interestingly, despite the abbreviated wind up, Esaam also had a fairly high toss with the ball dropping probably over two feet from the top to the contact. So there were some disparate elements.

As Doug Eng has shown in his article on serve rhythms (Click Here) abbreviated motions correlate with abbreviated tossing motions, and lower tosses. Classic windups have higher tosses and more movement in the tossing arm.

But which rhythm pattern was Esaam? Should we evaluate him on the toss and the tossing motion, or on the windup?

So that was one issue, but the side view revealed very important one as well. This was the position of the contact point. Our various studies of pro serving show that the contact point should be just at the front edge of the body, aligned with something like the edge of the nose.

When we looked at Esaam from the side though, his contact point was a good foot further back, aligned closer to his rear, right shoulder than the edge of his face.

So, again, where to begin? The wind up motion? The tossing motion? The contact point?

One of the things I have observed over the years is that moving the contact point forward on the serve is very difficult once a player gets comfortable with striking the ball behind the front edge of the body.

"Toss more in front and move the contact more in front!" That sounds simple but it rarely happens with that type of direct input.

But what I have found is that difficult changes can sometimes be made successfully when paired with other structural changes that may be only indirectly related.

And there was another factor in the side view to consider. This was the fact that Esaam was landing on the baseline with his front foot, rather than inside the court. His back leg kick back also moved too much to his right instead of more directly backward toward the fence.

My instinct was that if Esaam landed correctly in the court and developed a better kick back, he wouldn't be able to keep the old contact point. His body would be much more forward, and the old contact point might feel really far behind him. In addition the timing of the kick back would also affect the body rotation, and might make it much more natural to strike the ball more in front.

To help him create the right image, we looked at Federer as a model from the new High Speed Archive. My hope was that this image might help him to adjust his toss naturally, without consciously thinking about anything other than changing the landing. (Click Here to see the Federer High Speed Archive in all its glory.)

And that was exactly what happened. We worked first on bending the knees without the ball, then uncoiling and hopping forward into the court with the goal of landing with the heel just inside the baseline.

At the same time I had Esaam model a more direct kick backward with his right, rear leg. I asked him to imagine that he was showing me the sole of his shoe to me at the landing as I stood directly behind him.

The change was almost instantaneous. Feeling that he would be landing about a foot further forward, Esaam just naturally adjusted the position of the ball. The contact point not only moved forward, it moved into virtually perfect position at the front edge of the body.

The result in terms of his ball velocity was immediate. The ball sounded different off the racket and was definitely moving significantly faster. Better yet, Esaam reported that the motion felt much easier—more relaxed and much more fluid. Previously he had the sense of making a lot of muscle effort, but feeling that it never really translated in the ball.

This was a great result for him, but then other stuff started to happen. Specifically, there was another natural progression that only made things better, as Esaam adjusted the pairing of technical elements in his motion.

One of the things I have learned is that, usually, when a player makes a major technical advance, it's best to let him consolidate it for a while, even if the stroke has other significant problems.

That was basically my attitude about the miss match between the movement patterns of his tossing arm and racket arm discussed above. I was happy to leave it for another day. He had made a really important improvement and I felt we might be risking having that fall apart by pushing for too much more too soon.

But as he worked to consolidate the changes in the contact and leg kick, right before my eyes and without me saying a word, Esaam's wind up began to change to a more classical movement, one that corresponded much better with his tossing motion and his toss height.

I was just watching this happen when Esaam stopped and told me that the more classical windup simply felt better with everything else he did.

It was a great progression of events, watching him move through another major change basically spontaneously. I have to say I was very pleased with my decision to start by changing his landing and what it all led too.

But as much or more of the credit had to go to Esaam for being so intuitive with his motion and letting himself feel how to put the elements together. Like I said, sometimes things just seem to come together.