How to serve practise

It depends on what your level is

Yugen said:

Hi community. What should I prioritise when serve practising alone at the table? What is the order of importance? For example:
1. Be able to get maximum spin potential
2. Placement
3. Length
4. Deception

I just need some ideas on effective serve practise progression as I won't have acces to a training partner for quite a while.

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It depends on your level.

If you are just starting, learning how to make lots of spin on your serve should be your number one priority.
In general, you should get the hang of spinning the ball on everything you do until it feels natural and easy.

After that, length, placement, and deception.

Length is important, since you need short serves to prevent your opponent from looping your serve. Placement is pretty easy, but also important.

Deception is at the final level, where you actually need to have multiple good serves that look roughly the same.

It should be touch and contact that you should bw developing first.

With serves the most important is the Practice.
No matter the kind of serve, you have to practice it thousands times untill you start to make exactly the same every time.
After that you may continue with different variations of the same kind of serve, shorter-longer, more spin-less spin, different directions and placement. Try another kind of serve only after you get confident with that. One serve per session.

yogi_bear said:

It should be touch and contact that you should bw developing first.

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+1

if you can't land the ball where you want, the rest is pointless

I normally instruct my students do master 2 kinds of serves before I tell them to worry about the spin amount.

1) short ball to drop the ball just over the net on the "down the line" and "cross court". The down the line, to try and hit the net post.
the cross court - also try and hit the net post
Both serves, you will need to learn to control your touch and your first bounce before your 2nd bounce will be at the target

2) long ball from white line (first bounce) to other side white line (2nd bounce), down the line and cross court

I will say, each serves 250 times a day is a good start (making it 1000 serves), and this is doable inside 1 hour.

Do you recommend any specific types of serves to young kids, like my son who is 10?

ttdad said:

Do you recommend any specific types of serves to young kids, like my son who is 10?

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A lot of the younger kids at our local club give people trouble with a good tomahawk/hook serve and a pendulum serve. I like the BH serve more than the tomahawk because it allows me to stay in better position, but YMMV. I learned a bunch of different types of serves at the expense of being able to control and vary 2 serves well and it bit me hard when I got to a level where people could loop/kill loose or predictably placed serves.

ttdad said:

Do you recommend any specific types of serves to young kids, like my son who is 10?

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At that age, table height can make quite a few serves hard. And, importantly, most kids I see have a rather strong hand preference, BH mostly. It takes a while to connect the two.

It depend on play level and touch development too. I often end up with teaching a BH serve with varied placement, depth, spin and maybe some deception; but that’s no OSFA.

ttdad said:

Do you recommend any specific types of serves to young kids, like my son who is 10?

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I think at that age it's important just to learn how to make spin.

Here's an old video where a guy is trying to show how to do a Ghost Serve (ie - really heavy backspin serve). Anyways, don't focus so much on that but what he's practicing.

Link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEhLzWUvSOA

Picture: Honestly the ball doesn't even have to go over. See if you son can make the ball come back to him.


If he can do this? Congratulations. He knows how to make spin. Now just do that over & over starting to push it further & further until it goes over the net. It teaches you feel & spin.

Unfortunately, one of my good buddies at club simply cannot do this. Despite what I've told him, he still hits the back side of the ball and it just goes forward.

You really want to skim under the ball and in my head I a lot of times try to think hitting on the front of the ball.

But this would be the first step I'd teach your son. Can he make spin.

I think topspin and sidespin serves are easier to learn but I think it is better if you would teach underspin serves first while developing their ball contact. Letting them feed underspin balls can also help develop their contact.