Are You Getting Aced By Slower Serves?

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Are you getting beat on your return of serve by getting aced by slower serves?

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Hi, I'm Dr. Patrick Comb and in today's podcast I'm going to answer a question from Tony about getting aced by slower serves. How this is so frustrating. Here's what Tony had to say. I keep getting aced by slower serves, which is so irritating. Someone hits a banger and I'll get my racket on it. Someone dinks one over and I'll get it back easily. But when someone hits a medium pace serve into a corner, it beats me clean. I don't even move strange because I can get my racket to slow and even fastballs, but medium pace serves catch me off guard. How can I get better with this? What's breaking down mentally? Well Tony, when your opponent hits a fast serve, you only have time to simply react. When your opponent hits a slower serve, you have plenty of time to move in and take the serve. What I think might be operating here mentally from the mental perspective for you is is that you might be overthinking what to do with the medium pace serve. In other words, you have just enough time to overthink it, but really not enough time to maybe move in and play it like a second slower serve. So with that said, how can you prepare mentally? What I suggest to players on the return of serve is to simply pre play each option. When I say each option, if it's out wide, down the middle or into the body. So typically there's going to be three locations. You want to pre play each of those locations while you're waiting for your serve. In other words, as you go through your routine and your setup, quickly see those particular serves in your mind and how you're going to handle those serves. For example, if you see it out wide, see yourself moving quickly to the out wide and then taking it cross court, for example down the middle, maybe you see yourself moving quickly down to the down the middle location and going ahead and hitting it back down the middle and certainly into the body. How are you going to take that into the body? You might experience yourself stepping to one side or the other and taking that serve. So you really want to pre play the options and get to the point where you can simply react if you're not doing anything. If you're standing there and watching it and not reacting, you're paralyzing yourself in some way. Either I can't get there or you're overthinking what you're going to do with the serve in that moment and that's preventing you from doing anything. So in your routine, put pre play the serves and then watch the ball carefully off the racket and simply react based upon your visualization that you did in your service routine. Hope that helps. Hey, if you want some more information on mental training for tennis or interested in mental coaching, visit sportspsychologytennis.com, click on contact Us. Shoot me an email and let me know what you need.

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