Tennis: Add Your Hips

Develop your juniors serve by starting with the fundamentals. As such a vital part of the game, making training effective yet enjoyable is a must, so use this session to get the best from your players.

The player tosses the ball up and leaves the non-dominant hand in the air. Ball should drop into the player's hand.

Serve with Hand: This exercise is a great tool to warm up whole serving action while working on proper rhythm. Player stands close to the net without the racquet. Player tosses the ball and serves while using the bare hand. Hitting in the highest point of contact and making the action smooth are priorities for this warm up drill.

Player learns how to toss the ball into the proper spot. Coach stands on the right of the player (slice serve) or on the left of the player (kick serve). Player tries to toss the ball into the coach's hand.

Players have to be able to vary the toss according to the serve they want to execute. Slice, kick serve and flat serves require slightly different tosses to make chances bigger for effective results.

For the kick serve, toss to the left side is a necessity to successfuly deliver the ball with high and unexpected bounce. Hitting from the left to the right will add spin responsible for ball bounces to the right side. Tossing the ball to the left helps also with contacting the ball at lower point (in opposite to any other serve) which has an impact on loopy trajectory of the serve.

Player sits on both knees on the ground. Player executes top spin serve.