the underhand serve i never realized how much of a hot topic this was until i posted on instagram
underhand serve of mine and i captioned it underhand serve yes or no and i got a lot of
engagement on this post and people were extremely opinionated and passionate about this topic so in
today's video i'm going to give you my opinion on the underhand serve as a fan as a coach and
as a player so first i'm going to give you my opinion on the underhand serve as a tennis fan
so i absolutely love watching somebody do an underhand serve it is something that's
very exciting i often find myself rewinding the tape and watching it again recently at the miami
tournament i saw bublik do an underhand serve in the first game of the second set i think he did
four underhand serves and one service game and it was very entertaining to watch of course we know
that nick kyrgios does underhand serves very frequently and the most famous underhand serve
of all time was michael chang against ivan lendl in the french open fourth round i believe and
this is the underhand serve that everybody remembers because michael chang not only won
that match but he ended up winning at the entire tournament and guys the reason why i love watching
somebody do an underhand serve is because it's exciting to see the opponent's reaction usually
the opponent is so flustered they're so surprised they're scrambling up to the net
and it's just something that's funny to watch and this doesn't only apply to the underhand serve
anytime something out of the ordinary happens in a tennis match i find that to be very exciting
and i often find myself rewinding the tape to watch it again so as a tennis fan i love
watching players do underhand serves as a player in my whole career i've never done the underhand
serve even a single time and this is for a couple of reasons reason number one from a
tactical standpoint it doesn't make any sense to me to do a serve that goes i don't know maybe
10 miles an hour or 15 miles an hour where my serve is my best weapon and i can often get an ace
or a service winner now players will often stand further back when i'm serving this happens quite
frequently and it would make sense to surprise them and do like a little quick short serve like
that and get them scrambling up but to me this is still a high a risk move because they can easily
move up to that ball hit a decent approach shot and put me under pressure i am much more
comfortable to go for that service winner or an ace people often forget that it's actually kind of
tricky to do a serve like this it does require a quite good hand skills to get the ball very
low over the net and make it bounce low on the other side and if someone does an underhand serve
against me in a match i feel insulted i'm going to get extra motivation to not only win that
point but win the whole match and this applies to most players it is extremely insulting to receive
an underhand serve and that's another reason why i as a player don't want to use it i don't want to
give the other guy more motivation i don't want to insult him get him angry he is going to want
to beat me even more so for those reasons i would never ever attempt an underhand serve and finally
as a coach i would never tell any of my players to employ underhand serves and here's the reasons
why while this might work a few times it's not going to work long term because here's the fact
about underhand serves the one thing that underhand serves have going for them is the surprise
factor so the first couple of times you do an underhand serves your opponent is going to be surprised
they're going to be scrambling up maybe missing the ball or giving you an easy passing shot
however once you overdo it the opponent is going to start expecting the underhand serve
and they're going to be able to do more damage with a very weak slow ball and it's simply going
to stop working so i would tell my players look even though an underhand serve might
suit you well once or twice in a match after all it suited michael chang phenomenally well
i don't think it's worth it to do it for the following reasons number one as i mentioned
previously you are going to motivate your opponent most players will get extremely insulted
in an underhand server and they're gonna want to beat you even more reason number two most people
perceive an underhand service something that's unclassy or unsportsmanlike so if you ever have
somebody watching you play and you do an underhand serve you're not gonna gain
uh fans from that uh the vast majority of the people will think of you as an unclassy or
unsportsmanlike player my opinion as a coach is that it's not worth ruining your reputation it's
not worth trying to trick your opponent trying to surprise him of course it's legal there's nothing
wrong with doing it but in my opinion it's better to win the classy way and it's not only
the underhand serve you can for example do the old ivan lendl trick basically bring the opponent into
the net and then when they're at the net you could go right at their chest of course this is a really
good tactic um when you hit the ball very hard right at someone and they have very little time to
react and you're going to win the points most of the time but is this something that you should do
absolutely not it's unsportsmanlike is unclassy and so is the underhand serve