Your Strokes:
Ingrid Neel Serve

Analyzed by John Yandell

In the January issue of Tennisplayer, two of the world's top tennis scientists speculate on the importance of internal shoulder rotation in explaining the differences in serving speed between men and women. (Click Here.) It's a fascinating issue because many of the best women servers have far less of this hand and arm rotation than the men—one of the major technical divides between the two tours.

We saw this in the analysis I did of Maria Sharapova's serve (Click Here.) Compared to most male players, Maria has only half as much rotation from the racket drop to the followthrough. On many serves her racket face is pointing directly at the court instead of continuing to rotate counter clockwise and finishing on edge like the men. (For more on the shape of the upward swing and the hand and arm or internal shoulder rotation, Click Here.)

Bruce Elliott's research shows that the speed of this rotation of the arm in the upper shoulder by the women—again what I call hand and arm rotation--is not only shorter but it's about 20% slower than the men. This is about the same percentage difference as the difference in ball speed. But is this caused by physical differences in men and women or is it simply a technical factor?

Recently I did a serve analysis of a top women's ITF player, Ingrid Neel, that supports the conclusion that the technical factor is significant, maybe predominant. My conclusion is that abbreviated rotational movement is probably the cause of the lower rotational speed Bruce measured and that completing this rotation can have a significant impact on ball velocity—not just for women players but all players.

Learning to complete this rotation on the model of a great male server can add significant additional ball speed to the serves of players at any level.

The Story

I first talked to Brian Neel, Ingrid's father , about filming Ingrid early last year. We agreed to do it at Tennisplayer writer Kyle LaCroix's amazing club, Boca Oaks on my trip to Florida in March. Bryan told me that Ingrid had built her serve on the Federer model using Tennisplayer high speed video so I was interested to see what that looked like.

It turned out that Ingrid had a beautiful, rhythmic motion with a great racket drop, a pro contact point position, and a Federer inspired platform stance. Using a pocket radar gun, we measured her first serve speed at an average of 86mph. (Click Here for more on this fantastic teaching tool.)

But the one element that was missing compared to Roger was the completion of the internal shoulder or hand and arm rotation in the followthrough. Like Maria, Ingrid's rotation ended with the racket face pointing down at the court.

One of the reasons this critical rotation is not widely understood is that it happens too fast for the eye to see. This is why you have well-known "experts" advocating "carving" around the ball to hit wide slice serves, among other inaccurate ideas about how the racket is traveling around contact. (Click Here to see that the carving issue and the role of the hand and arm rotation in shot direction addressed this month in our Interactive Forum.)

This problem with perception was no different with Ingrid. The extent of the rotation was hard to see until we looked at it frame by frame in high speed video at 240 frames per second.

Since Federer was her model, naturally we set her side by side with Roger. Again going frame by frame we could see how Roger continued the internal shoulder rotation until the racket edge has fully turned over and was perpendicular to the court.

After looking at the video, it was obvious that there was no need to change much less reconstruct Ingrid's serve. All Ingrid needed to do was to continue the rotation of her hand and arm into the followthrough.

In the motion of her upward swing, the racket was rotating about 90 degrees from the racket drop to the contact. But thereafter the rotation stopped. It was the same as Maria.

So I had her simply model continuing to rotate her racket another 90 degrees without the ball, until the racket was inverted and on edge. I asked her to do it in slow motion, with her eyes closed, and also to do the rotation both from the contact and from the racket drop.

I asked her to form a mental image of the motion and also to imagine how it felt. Then I asked her to project that image out into space as a guide or a blueprint as she served, and make her actual racket pass through the image.

The result was amazing—almost from the first ball the rotation was complete. That's nice but the real payout was in the change in speed. Suddenly her average first serve jumped from 88mph to 95mph—a huge difference with no major changes in her motion, and this completed in only about an hour's work using high speed video, Tennisplayer high speed models, and a radar gun.

Her ball was also jumping higher and felt heavier according to Kyle who was hitting returns on the other side. In my opinion her serve was already perfectly suited to her aggressive serve and volley style and the increase in speed and weight had to help.

Ingrid has already won 5 ITF doubles tournaments and is going to play for the powerhouse University of Florida college women's team. Really looking forward to following her progress and to working with her again on her serve and maybe some other parts of her game.

Want to do this kind of work yourself on court with John Yandell? Click Here!