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How to hit a Kick Serve
Point of Contact
There is a big difference between the type of contact you make with the tennis ball -- how you hit it -- when you hit a kick vs. a flat serve. With a flat serve, you are trying to hit through the tennis ball, hit is square, "slap" it, etc. With the kick, you want the strings of your racket to brush up and across the tennis ball. You don't want to hit the ball "clean," so to speak. Let's take a look at Oliver serving. Watch how his racket moves differently and how, on the kick serve, the strings "brush" up and across the tennis ball.
Figure 1: Brushing the ball, versus swinging through it
The image below is Frank's flat and kick serves from above. The direction his strings are facing at contact for each serve is the same. That's key -- regardless of the serve you are hitting, you strings will always point more or less in the direction you want the tennis ball to go. That means you have to time your pronate a little bit differently for the kick serve (as opposed to the flat serve). In other words, you have to time your pronation so that your strings are facing the direction you want the ball to go at the instant you make contact.
Figure 2: Time your pronation so the strings are facing the direction you want the ball to go
One final point is that the contact height for a kick serve is SLIGHTLY lower than for a flat serve. Probably by about 1 - 2 inches, on average. You only need to let the ball drop far enough so you can swing up on it a little bit. Letting it drop, say, 6 inches is way too much. If you look at the two pictures of Oliver at contact, you'll see that his contact height is barely lower for a kick serve.
Figure 3: Contact is slightly lower for a kick serve
To reiterate, the key when learning how to hit a kick serve is to remember that the type of contact you make is different from a flat serve. The strings of your tennis racket need to brush up and across the ball to generate spin.
Back to Kick Serve Swing Direction «
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