The Ball Toss by Michael Starke
Posted by Michael Starke on 06 Nov 2006 at 06:54 am | Tagged as: General
The ball toss is a seemingly insignificant part of one’s arsenal, and a frequently ignored facet of basic instruction. Just because the toss lacks the glamour and sexiness of other shots does not mean it should be overlooked. The toss is a key component of the serve. Much of the success of your serve will be dictated by the accuracy of your toss.
I break down the placement of your toss into 3 categories, height, distance forward or backward, and the distance the ball travels to the left or right of your body. Not that I am a geometry whiz, but a 3D XYZ graph could easily illustrate what I will attempt to put into words. I will work on one, but until I do, you should probably read on.
Our mystery guest Jeff Swails is illustrating a low or incorrect point of contact. For height, one simply wants the toss to be as high as the outstretched arm. Reach your racquet arm up as high as you can so you feel your ribs stretch, then look up at your racquet. You want your toss that high, landing on the center of your strings. Ideally, you want to meet the ball as it sits still in space, neither on the way up or down. That is the easiest place to time the ball. It’s a pretty cool concept if you think about it.
Jeff, showing rapid improvement, correctly illustrates the height of contact. Next, you want your toss to be slightly forward of your body for a 1st serve. There is an easy test to perform that tells no lies. Enter into your service motion and toss the ball, but do not swing. Watch where your toss lands. If it lands in front of the baseline, within a foot or so, you have done your job. If it lands somewhere behind the baseline, you are leaning back to adjust to your toss, not really a good thing. A 2nd serve or spin serve is different. Toss the ball slightly behind and to the left ofyour body for your 2nd serve. This will enable you to arch your back and kick your body upward into the serve. Leftys must do the opposite. Again, take the toss test. It is harmless and tells the tale.
Finally, and I hate to get technical here, you must control your toss left or right in relation to your body. Generally speaking, you want your toss to be just to the right of your head, near your ear, where your natural arm motion travels. Like throwing a ball, you want to release just off to one side as opposed to behind your head or sidearm. Instructors tell students to toss the ball at 1 pm, 11 am for leftys.
Aside from where to toss the ball, there is the question of how to toss the ball. I will not really address that here. You’ve already had enough to digest in one reading. Instead, I refer you to the picture in our lobby of John McEnroe, taken in the early 80’s at the season-ending Masters Tournament then held at Madison Square Garden. Notice how high John’s tossing arm has reached before he released the ball. Perfection. Note also the open palm, how the ball has been lofted out of his hand as opposed to being tossed or thrown. Leftys please note that I have used one of you as the example.
For those of you who change your toss for serve placement, my suggestion is to control your serve placement with your wrist, not your toss. However, that is another tip for another time. In closing, while the above are general tips, the control of your toss is very important. The more accurate you are with your toss, the less your service arm has to adjust, making your serve more accurate and efficient.
Michael I agree the ball toss is very inportant in the serve, but somtimes us, the teaching pros are at fault in explaining the “toss”. People take this as a toss, moving their wrist as the move their arm upward, thus snapping that wrist and causing the ball to move off the point of contact. Our boy Sampras did it the best….rocking backwards onto the right foot and stopping for a quick second, then most his weight shifted forward onto his left foot as he reached as high as possible with shoulder going to his chin. This created a placement of the ball into the point of contract and very little move on the ball, making it much easier to hit. So maybe as teaching pros we should instruct the student to place the ball into the contact point. Just a thougth great web site and I look forward to this spring.
Dru Ackert