Interestingly enough, I know that service practice would be good for me. But I've rarely had a chance to actually do this. No room for a table at my place. And at the clubs I play at the tables are all pretty full. The only chance I'd ever really have is at my coaches house but she says my serves are above my level at the moment and would rather work on some other things to better round myself out.
IT would be interesting to understand what she means by your serves being above your level.
1) I know what it means in the context of people who generate more spin on their serves than they can play behind and read.
2) Or maybe you would win at least 3 points per game off an opponent who has never played you before just by serving, or
3) your serves never get attacked at your level in a way that costs you points even against people who play you all the time but are very aggressive.
People used to tell me when I was lower rated that I had good serves because people weren't attacking them hard. But when I started working with Brett, all of a sudden, I stopped losing to players rated much lower than myself. Initially, I found it puzzling, but over time, it became clearer to me that just by transferring what I learned about the reverse pendulum serve to other parts of my game, my serve deception went up, and suddenly players who would just return my serves and relax actually had to read the ball and this drew more errors and made them hesitate too. And my spin went up too, so I could get more errors on serve return.
But I had decent strokes already so I rarely ever served harder than I could attack. But just the improved serving made it easier to get a ball to attack behind. Because the errors made people return less confidently while in the past, after a couple of serves, people would stop missing because they knew what was on the ball and could tell more easily when I varied the quality.
The other thing that really understanding serving does is improve your strokes. Because people learn this sport in different ways. The first thing that raised the level of my loop was being able to get spin on my high toss serves. This let me see the importance of short whip motions (before I ever heard the word whip from Brett or anyone else) and I suddenly started using short whip motions to loop instead of proper loops. My consistency went through the roof when playing pips players. Even now, my loop is largely an arm whip with little if anything else done properly, but I generate some of the highest spin in my club, even more than some proper form loopers.
So it's things like this that make me tell people to work on their serves - because you never know where the insights will come from. Even learning to serve helped me return serves better. I still cannot read spin, but sometimes, I see the ball, and I remember it looking like something I served in my own videos, so I can tell that it is not what I used to think it was and it miraculously stays on the table with quality after I execute my stroke.
