The pickleball rules are changing, and one of the serve rules are changing.
In fact, I've heard a lot of people say,
oh, there's not going to be a spin serve anymore.
Not true.
Hey, everybody, my name is CJ Johnson, and together with my partner Tony Roig, we are
committed to cutting through the noise and helping you play your best pickleball.
And today we're going to be talking about the new rules for 2023.
So the spin serve is changing,
but does that mean there'll be no more spinning serves coming in your direction?
No, it's a specific
part of the spin serve or what we call the pre-spun serve.
So that means that before the service
motion is made where the ball hits the paddle, the ball can no longer be spun.
Now, Morgan Evans is the pro player, and
you might hear called the Morgan Evans serve.
He is the pro player who is credited with starting to utilize the serve.
And in essence, what they would do.
I'm going to actually put this in my right hand because I don't do it very well in my
right hand, I do it even worse than my left.
What they would do is they would hold the ball up here and then using a snapping
motion, I actually caught it, using a snapping motion, the ball starts to spin.
Then they would make contact with the serve.
That prespinning of the ball put extra motion spin motion into the shot.
More than that could just be created by the motion of the body and the shoulder.
And it caused some havoc.
It was very difficult serve to return.
So the serve that will no longer be allowed in 2023 is to pre-spin the ball.
So start the ball spinning before
the ball and the paddle make contact with each other.
You will still see serves that are spun.
It's very difficult to hit a ball that is what we call flat.
So a ball that's flat would be a ball that
comes off the paddle and has absolutely no spin on it.
Any time the ball and the paddle moves
into the ball, there's generally some type of spin imparted into the ball.
So as an example, if I were to in a
serving motion, take my paddle from this position here and cut across my body so
you can see the motion here or you can see the motion here.
If I were to do that cutting across my
body, I'm going to take and put spin on the ball.
That type of spin in the traditional serve will still be allowed as long as it meets
the other three requirements of the traditional serve, that'll be fine.
If you're not sure what those three
requirements are, click on the link up here and you can go deeper into that.
So you will, as a receiver, still be seeing spin serves.
With the new rule, one of the potential
challenges we see is that it will be up to the receiver to call a prespun ball.
So, as a receiver, I'm standing 40 plus feet away from the server.
For me, it's difficult to see, especially a very subtle move.
Again, the prespin is like a snap of the fingers, a rotation here.
For most people, this kind of rotation
with the ball, it's very, very difficult to see.
But it will be up to the receiver to say that that was a prespun ball.
How the rule is written right now is when
that receiver says, that was a prespun ball, it's not a fault on the server.
It simply is a do over.
The server has to serve the ball again.
So I think it's challenging for the
receiver to call that just simply because the receiver is so far away, and
it can be difficult in rec play situations when somebody receives a spun ball.
Was that ball spun because of something that happened before contact?
Or did it come from the stroke mechanic that the player was using?
I think that could be a little bit challenging.
Another bit of misinformation that we're
hearing is people say this rule will only apply to the pros.
That's not true.
This rule is a USA pickleball rule and it will apply to all USA pickleball players.
So no more pre spin of the ball for pros or amateurs.
A lot of you have asked about the drop serve as well.
So in the drop serve, you are not able to propel the ball downwards.
But with a spin, even if it wasn't a propulsion, let's just say you did a
motion, something like this, where you were spinning it in this direction,
the question would be, as the server, why would I want to do that?
Because if I start the ball spinning in a
drop serve, the minute the ball hits the court, it's going to move in
the direction it's spinning, and it's going to make hitting the shot, making
contact consistently much more difficult on me, the server.
So I really don't see an advantage to trying to spin the ball on the drop serve.
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