The first three shots of the game, the serve, the return of serve and the third shot are
keys to playing good pickleball.
Today were are going to talk about the serve.
What makes it legal and what makes it effective?
Stay tuned
Hey everybody it's CJ Johnson.
Today were going to talk about the serve and what every savvy pickleball player needs to
know to make it legal and to make it effective, But before we do that if you haven't done
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Let's start today with the serve.
Talking about what are the things that you need to do to make it legal.
So there's three things that make a serve legal.
First of all the contact has to happen below the waist and in the rule book the waist is
defined as the naval. So contact with the paddle and the ball happens below the waist.
Number two.
The arm needs to be traveling in an upward motion.
So here. I think that's pretty self explanatory.
Right?
An upward motion and contact below the waist.
Number three.
The paddle and is in this case it’s defined as the paddle head which is absent the grip,
needs to be below the wrist.
Here it's below.
Here it’s above
Here it's above, here it’s below.
So it has to be below the wrist.
I see a lot of players make contact in front and make an upward motion but they have the
paddle up here to the side and the head of the paddle cannot be above the wrist.
So here's what it looks like, when you're serving.
Now that you know what makes a serve legal What makes a serve effective?
Number one it has to be in.
You only get to score points while you're serving so it's crucial that you don't give
up on that opportunity.
Point number two.
You want that serve to be deep.
When it's deep it makes for a more difficult return of service for your opponent.
If you hit that serve short, or really short you bring your opponents into the net even
more quickly.
And let's face it pickleball is one of the few sports where you are on the defensive
while you're serving.
So you need to make sure that you send that serve deep.
Now not everybody can make a hard serve go deep.
So when you go out to play make sure you experiment a little bit with the trajectory.
What does it look like, how hard is it, how soft is it.
The goal is to make sure that you can get that serve within three feet of that baseline.
Point number three. Now that you got it and you’ve got it deep the bonus point is to
get it to your opponents weaknesses.
So when you're playing against people you already know you understand if they have a
hard time with a high shot or a hard shot, is their backhand better than their forehand
or vice versa.
So when you're playing against people you know you have an advantage. You should be serving
to whatever their weakest return is.
If you play against people you don't know more often than not start with the backhand.
For most of us the backhand is a weaker shot than the forehand is. So start by serving there
and see how well they do and if you need to make adjustments after that.
Now you know the three keys to a legal as well as an effective serve.
Bonus note: There is only one place in the rule book where it talks about where you have
to stand on the court and that has to do with the serve.
So what you want to do is click on a link that's popping up above.
Somewhere up above here it's going to take you to a blog post and it's going to show
you exactly where that is.
Now come back next week we're going to talk about the basics.
When you look at good servers, they look really different but you know what?
They have a few things in common.
We're going to talk about what makes them good servers.
If you got value from this video make sure that you give it a like or thumbs up or a
comment down below because together we can Train Smart, Live Bold Age Well.