The Serve Stance

The first step of the serve is the stance. The video starts with a shot of me in my stance. Let’s begin by zooming in on my feet and seeing how I have positioned them. My front foot is directly behind the baseline angled diagonally into the court. My back foot is behind my front foot, about shoulder width apart, and parallel with the baseline (do I need to mention somehting about it being to the right of my front foot, from the camera’s perspective).

Moving back to the full body view at 25 seconds in the video above, I’m holding the tennis racket with a continental grip or something close to it. Any acceptable serving grip works fine. I’m pointing the tennis racket at the net and I’m holding the tennis ball against the throat of the racket.

This stance is commonly called the “party stance” because it’s how you might stand if you were talking to someone at a party. Roger Federer is one of the pros who uses this stance.

At 0:45 in into the video we look at Tim Henman in his stance. Like Federer, he uses the party stance. First we’ll focus on Heman’s feet. He has his front foot angled diagonally into the tennis court and he has his back foot behind his front foot running parallel with the baseline.

From the front view of Heman in his stance, he’s holding the tennis racket with an acceptable serving grip and he’s pointing the racket at the net. Zooming in on his left hand, the hand that’s holding the tennis ball, he’s holding the ball against the racket and he’s also holding the ball in his fingers. This last point — holding the tennis ball in your fingers as opposed to your palm — is very important and we’ll get into more detail about that in the next video, which focuses on the toss.