Tennis Player

Every coaches’ room has this argument. It’s the wrong argument. Here’s where serve speed actually comes from — and what to coach instead. If you’ve spent any time around tennis coaches, you’ve heard the debate. Foot-up or foot-back. Pinpoint or platform. Somebody swears the pinpoint stance is the only way to get a high contact […]

The serve is built on the court. But the body that survives ten thousand of them is built off it. Here’s a conversation I have with coaching colleagues more often than I’d like. A player’s serve plateaus, or their shoulder starts barking, and the whole fix-it conversation lives inside the swing — the toss, the

Most coaches diagnose the serve where the problem shows up. The good ones diagnose it upstream, where the problem actually started. Here’s the mistake I made for years, and watch other coaches make every week: a player’s serve breaks down, and we go to work on the broken part. The contact looks late, so we

If a player’s serve is short, weak, or sore, you’ve probably been watching the swing. Look at the toss instead. Half the serve problems on your court trace back to one bead on the wire — and it’s the second one, not the seventh. Here’s a pattern you’ve seen a hundred times. A player has