My daughter is a junior tennis player. She started playing tennis at five years
old she's 12 now. So she's been playing tennis for seven years and recently we
decided to sign her up for volleyball, because it might be good for her to do a
team sport. And interestingly she quickly developed a good volleyball serve. And I
was interested to see how her volleyball serve might affect her tennis serve.
Could it make it better or could it possibly make it worse? So in today's
video we're going to discuss the similarities between a volleyball serve
and a tennis serve.
There are different types of volleyball serves but the one that we're interested
in is the jump topspin serve, because this one has the most similarities to a
tennis serve. So the way a jump topspin serve works is the player will in most
cases throw the ball with the dominant arm and they will also put topspin on the
ball and they will throw the ball way ahead of themselves in front. And now the
next thing that happens on the serve is the player will jump and become airborne
and then in the air and the feet are gonna point a parallel to each other
like this and the body is gonna go into a bend into a c-shape and now the player
will get his dominant elbow pointing straight back while the non-dominant arm
is in the air and I heard this referred to as the Nike swoosh.
So the contact on the volleyball serve should be made when the player is at
highest point in a jump and what the player will do then he will uncoil
this C shape and rotate into the contact with the ball and so this is what it
looks like. In midair the body will straighten, uncoil
and at contact the shoulders will be parallel to each other
Once the volleyball player has made contact the finish will depend on what
kind of serve the player is attempting but the body will usually go into a slight a
jackknife position and I suppose this is done to regain balance because this is
occurring in midair. So you will see the volleyball player go slightly down with
the upper body while the feet go forward
There are a lot of similarities between a volleyball serve and a tennis serve but
the one that stands out the most is the rotation of the torso. So we talked about
the Nike swoosh in volleyball and if you compare this to the trophy position in
tennis is very similar. So we have the elbow pointing back now in tennis it can
point even further around the body like this to get more of a coil. This is
impossible to do in midair on a volleyball serve. So we're going to have
an advantage there as tennis players but the similarities are that we have this
reversal of the shoulder positions where the dominant shoulder is below the
non-dominant shoulder and now what's going to happen as we initiate the
strike and accelerate the serve. We're going to reverse this shoulder position
and we're going to also rotate the torso and we're gonna make contact at the
exact same place as a volleyball player.
And the way these two serves accelerate into the contact is exactly the same. The uncoiling of the upper body
in addition to the reversal of the shoulder positions. This is what creates
a lot of acceleration. So a volleyball serve will go like this into the contact
and a tennis serve will go exactly the same way. You will rotate into the
contact while reversing these shoulder positions and now once you reach this
position naturally you will achieve a full extension of the hitting arm and
that's the case for volleyball and tennis
Is it possible to do a tennis volleyball serve? So basically throw the ball
with the dominant arm and then leap into the court and slam the ball into the box.
It actually is possible and it's been done by the one and the only
Brian Battistone a former top 100 ATP doubles player
I tried the Brian Battistone slash tennis volleyball serve
and it is extremely difficult to pull off and I might even say it's almost
impossible. And Brian is an exceptional athlete and he can pull it off, but the
problem is that whether it's a jump volleyball serve or a tennis volleyball
serve the contact has to be made when the player is at the highest point of
the jump and you do not want to hit the ball on your way down. So this timing
is very tricky. And the reason why volleyball players have to leap into the
air to get power is that they don't have this pesky little thing. They have to
generate all the power from their own body. So this is why you will see them
throw the ball way up into the air and then use the pace of the ball that's
coming down to generate more power. They are exceptional athletes that can jump
very high and now they're gonna make contact at a higherpoint and able
to get more power that way. See we don't have to do this on a tennis serve
because we have the tennis racket and so a stationary volleyball serve will go to
about 35 miles an hour. The fastest volleyball serve ever recorded was 134
km/h which is 83 miles an hour and what we can do with a tennis racket is even
with a stationary serve by only using our arm we can easily get a hundred
miles an hour, which means that a stationary tennis serve is a lot faster
than the fastest volleyball serve. So I think my daughter is safe playing
volleyball. I actually think that it can in some ways improve her tennis serve if
she continues to work on our tennis toss, because as you know the tennis
toss at the junior level at the recreational level and even some of the
professional players have difficulties with the toss. So the toss is something
that's unique to the tennis serve and must be practiced a lot, but as far as
sports similarities, the volleyball serve is the closest thing we have to a
tennis serve.