How to practice your second serve consistency
Here’s a simple game you can play on your own to recreate match pressure and get a better, more reliable second serve…
There’s a saying in tennis that ‘you’re only as good as your second serve’, so it’s important to stop worrying about your serve and start enjoying it. Feeling pressure on the second serve is really common – and so often it can lead to an easy opportunity for your opponent or the dreaded double fault.
It’s easy enough to practise carefree first serves alone, but it’s very difficult to recreate in training the pressures that you feel in a match. So when it comes to serving a bucket of balls in practice, it can all feel too easy and boring; so it’s tricky to really practice a ‘second serve’.
This is a little game that can make the boring monotony of serving a bucket of balls slightly more fun - and go some way to getting that feeling of match pressure.
The ‘Second Serve Against Yourself’ game - How to play:
1) Get a bucket of balls and ‘play a set’ against yourself. You get just one serve on each side.
2) If you get it in then you score a point (15-0).
3) If you miss it’s a ‘double fault’ and your imaginary opponent scores (15-15)... And so on.
4) See if you can win a virtual ‘set’.
5) If playing outside, change ends properly as you would in a real game, so you face all the different conditions.
Simple as that!
You can tailor the game for whatever you need to practice. For example, you can do a set of slice serves or kick serves, or you might be trying a chopper grip out for the first time...
For more advanced players, you can set out some cones/drinks bottles/jumpers to make the targets more challenging than simply ‘in’.
What you’ll get:
Much needed serve practice - it’s a fun way of getting a lot of serves hit
Practice at putting your serve under match pressure - or as close as you can get
A good measure for how your serve is improving (e.g. ‘this week I won 6-3, whereas last week it was only 7-5’).
See also:
How to cut down on double faults
How to stop worrying about your serve
Mastering the contact point: How to read the ball and get in the perfect position to hit it
Lizzie Flint is a writer and a practicing level 3 LTA professional tennis coach.