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Yesterday I played with someone new and he agreed after some warm up to play games with 1 person serving the entire game. His serves were decent but I found after re reading all the tips and that TTedge app I was quickly able to adapt. I did find myself relying more on the flight of the ball, I tried to open absolutely everything that didn't bounce twice, also tried to open up on short serves too (not too much success though) only really working if serve was a little high.
All in all was very good and I learnt a lot and felt more comfortable and confident. I will focus more on bat-ball contact at some point as I can definitely feel I need to work on that.
But thanks for all the help
For what it's worth, serve return was one of the worst aspects of my game and in some ways, it is generally below my overall playing level even now. I tend to only be able to play someone if they have basic serves or their serves are mostly the same spin (and in that case, mostly backspin). I play better vs backspin than I do vs topspin. And a lot of this is simply down to when I started and how my first serious coach educated me on handling spin. Unfortunately, he was a chopper who used LP on his backhand so while he gave me a good push, he didn't really address adjusting to spin, in part because his game wasn't designed to go in the same direction as mine.
So I formed a bad habit of pushing every serve at first, which worked in matches at first because I had a heavy push and most players at my level didn't do so well at attacking backspin when I first started playing. But as my opponents developed higher levels of spin on their serves and better attacking skills, this no longer worked. But my instincts were already badly formed. I had heard the advice about matching the serving angle, but it hurt me more than it helped because people would serve deceptive side topspin serves with open racket angles and it would mess me up completely.
So Brett (TTEdge) would watch my matches and wonder why I pushed so many topspin serves and I told him that it was two fold - the bigger problem was that I wasn't trained to read them, and the biggest problem was that if I read them, I didn't have a great strategy for dealing with them. So every time I asked him to teach serve return, he told me that it was a waste of time if you couldn't read the spin and that if you read the spin on a serve well, your options for returning it were pretty much infinite. So he told me to wait until the TTEdge app was formed.
The app massively improved my ability to focus on subtle racket angle changes and contact. Many people say things like that the app is limited and when the serves run out, you can't use it anymore etc. But for me, the key is to focus on contact and the way the ball comes off. Look at racket, position before contact, position at contact, position, after contact (the swing trajectory is important for establishing the spin as different things happen if the ball is hit with an angle etc.
But over time, you find too that some people hide the serve - this is when focusing on the ball flight is very important. It was even more important during the hidden serve era and you won't find many people who played seriously during the hidden serve era complaining on and on about serve return. I still don't know how to do this naturally, but I do notice that some serves look *funky* and I realize that they are not the same spin as the other serve that I put into the net, so I don't treat the *funky* ball the same way.
Quality of return is really the issue with serve return. But that is a whole nother topic.
Sometimes, jerking elbows, where the racket starts, looking at where on the racket the ball was contacted, looking at whether they are using pips or inverted, compensating more for sidespin than for topspin - these are things you get with practice and experience, sometimes even subconsciously. Sometimes, the best servers use these subconscious cues to deceive you. Someone who played LGL in his hidden serve heyday said that all the serves came with all the wrong spins.
The last thing I learned over time is something I stress to someone who is losing badly to a good server - continue to probe and realize that if it is a best of 5, your brain will adapt over time, so don't let how badly you are doing returning his serves affect your ability to win on yours. I lost badly to a penhold server at the NA Teams in 2014 (and we had played a few times, he was rapidly improving but the main thing was that I always struggled with his serves) and then I was pissed that I couldn't return his serves. Then I went home and watched the video - I noticed that my return of his serves got better and better throughout the match, and that what really did me in was my inability to play properly behind my own serves. Then I Watched my higher rated club mate play him at a tournament the next month - my clubmate lost the first game unable to return his serves. Then my club mate wins the next game at 9. Then wins the next two games easily and the last game at zero.
So I played the penholder at Nationals the next month in Vegas and I lost the first game again. But this time, I didn't panic and I won the next 3. He assumed I had seriously studied the video of how he served so I returned them better, but the truth was that I just realized that he was a good server, but that he was not such a good player that I needed to play out of my skin to win - I just needed to play well behind my serves and then let my brain adjust and return his serves better in time.
So the main thing is that practice watching the server. It will get better with time and practice. But don't let issues returning serves get to you - if someone is serving so well that you can't read their serves over the course of 3 games, it is usually (though with rare exceptions) someone you wouldn't beat if you could return their serves over the course of 3 games.
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