What Makes a Good Serve?
This is a brand-new, technique-focused column in a question-and-answer format. The mystery figures answering are two former national team members, both now veteran coaches. So the “Reaching the Summit” column was born.
Is practising the lob useful? Can it make one’s style more tenacious? Or is it unrelated to style — as long as your feet are nimble, you can scramble to save it? Watching Ding Ning save balls, she seems to save them “farther” than others — is her footwork faster?
Lobbing in a match is a method born of no other method. But actively practising the lob has two purposes: one, training mindset — lob well and the mindset is surely good; two, training feel. Ding Ning is actually not fast, but “soft,” similar to Zhang Yining. Good continuity, good tactical patterns. So-called “soft” means, when passive, she can entangle the opponent and persist in getting the ball over the net. Of course, being tall with long legs is an advantage, and her willpower is no problem.
How do I simplify my serve? I feel my serve types are too many, with decent variation, but the effect always feels too bland. What is a truly good serve?
To serve well is not about serving how fast, short, charging, fast-long, or bumping. A good serve is nearly identical motions with very large spin differences, hard to read. First, relax, and through arm and fingers sense the ball’s weight and the contact point at the instant of touching the ball. Practice this sensing; once sensing is precise, accelerate the fingers’ friction. Once more precise, practice the wrist leading the fingers to accelerate friction. Once more precise, practice using the body’s center of gravity to lead the wrist and fingers to brush. Step by step, no rush, finally using the body to control the ball’s placement. You must learn to touch the ball with fingers and bat. After the ball leaves, about one centimeter off the bat, the fingers accelerate instantly — this is the so-called fake-motion friction. Fake-motion friction, combined with real friction, makes the spin difference very large, hard for the opponent to read.
(Heima’s aside: while editing, I marveled, “this part really suits players above 2000 points to study.”)
A good serve, first, is the instant acceleration at bat contact, in a very short time. Second, changing the ball’s spin rate by touching different positions of the bat face. Third, serves all use angular velocity — you can use the wrist’s angular velocity or the waist’s, and the difference between them is very large. Think about Ma Lin’s style: rally, quick-exchange, continuity, violence index, speed — in none was he top-tier, many even inferior to provincial-team players, so why could he win an Olympic title? What did he rely on? One, the brain; two, the serve; three, variation.
For a five-or-six-year-old, is a month enough to fix the stroke framework, practising daily?
For a child this small, fixing the stroke framework is actually not so important. What matters is making him feel playing through the body’s center of gravity. Daily, just practice finding the center and bouncing the ball. Solid feet — that is step one. Then step two, find the center. A child this small need not rush to the table. Whether the ball is good, steady, explosive, including continuity, spin, angle and rhythm, all are inseparable from the center of gravity. This is the priority of priorities. However ugly or non-standard the stroke, as long as he finds the center, over time, this person’s ball will not be too bad.