Your Strokes:
Gavin Serve

John Yandell

It never ceases to amaze me the variety of technical elements players have in their strokes when they come to my court for video analysis. The challenge after analyzing the video is what elements to try to change, and especially in what order.

Last summer I had a chance to work with Barry Gilbert's two sons, Drew who is 15 and Gavin who is 10. Barry is Brad's older brother and an old friend. Both kids are talented and are having tournament success! And I enjoyed working with them.

In September we looked at Drew's forehand. (Click Here.) This month let's look at Gavin's serve.

Gavin had a narrow platform stance. He also had an abbreviate windup. In addition he had a pretty extreme serve grip with his hand rotated toward the top of the handle.

None of those are necessarily ideal. But his serve had a couple of tremendous other elements that were literally pro level—amazing for age 10.

First his racket drop. It was really deep and fell along the right edge of his body, actually deeper than many pro players, including Roger Federer. Second he had full hand, arm, and racket rotation in the swing up to the ball and out into the extension.

This is often incorrectly called "pronation" but in reality, it's internal shoulder rotation. Gavin rotated his arm and racket a full 90 degrees after contact. Almost all great pro servers do that but, again, pretty amazing for age 10.

All this showed Gavin had a strong, very flexible shoulder and I wanted to keep that at all cost regardless of any changes we made. So what were my ideas about changes?

Contact Point

When we looked at Gavin's contact point it was quite far to his right. His racket tip and racket shaft were basically pointing straight up at the sky.

What that meant was that his serve had virtually no topspin component although he could hit a heavy slice. So that contact point is what we focused on. That meant making one simple change in his toss without disrupting the other mechanics in his motion.

I showed this to Gavin and then compared his contact point with (who else?) Roger Federer. But we didn't focus on the other elements I mentioned at the start of the article.

Instead we looked only at the contact point, and specifically the angle or tilt in his racket head at contact. On a first serve--for Federer and all great servers--the tip and shaft of his racket are tilted 15 degrees or so to his left.

This indicates that there is an upward brushing action on the ball as he comes into contact. Most of the spin on any high level serve is sidespin or slice, but the topspin component is critical and you can see what this is in the angle of the racket at contact.

So for Gavin it was a simple change—changing the arc of his toss so that it came further back to his left. And Gavin was able to do this virtually from the first ball—like I said, he is a talented kid.

As the video shows after we modeled the change, the angle of his racket tip at contact matched Federer almost perfectly. He still made some tosses too far to the right, but he was able to recognize this, catch the toss and not hit it.

Next Step

Barry and his family live in New Jersey and were in the Bay Area to visit family. Most likely they will be back next summer. Barry is going to bring the boys over when that happens.

At that point we can see how the new contact point is working for Gavin, how his motion may have evolved on some of the other issues and contemplate additional work. I look forward to it!