Thanks Ray!
I have a tendency to stand completely upright in the middle of all my serves, and this causes my contact point to be a little too high above the net. I am short, but not so short that I can stand completely upright and still contact the ball at chest height like I need to be doing. I think a slightly lower ball toss would help me keep the serve shorter, too. It's difficult to take a large, agressive whip at any high toss serve and have the control to keep it short.
What Carl is telling you is a couple of things - first of all, it isn't always the absolute spin that matters, but the amount of spin generated relative to the appearance of what the motion is capable of generating. Do I really have the heaviest backspin serve in PA? Maybe not, but when you see it, the motion is so small you don't think that can really be that heavy.
The other more subtle thing is what the high toss does. To get spin, what you really are looking for is to get the rubber and wood to deform, mostly rubber if you want to serve short with heavy spin. The high toss helps you do that, so what you need is a shorter version of the whip, similar to what I showed in my serve stroke whip video, but the punch version. Carl likens the motion to using the drumstick to crash a cymbal, Brett likes it to hammering a nail, but just make the motion really short. Since the ball is going to be helped into your rubber by gravity, you will get deceptively high levels of spin - they may be medium high levels of spin, but the pace of the ball will make it look like no spin to someone who has been dealing with low toss serves where the spin and the speed and in sync with size of the motion and they will put those into the net.
Here are two examples with a different serve in a real match. Usually, I toss the ball lower but just as a change up since he had returned my serve well the whole match and these were potentially the last two points, I threw the first toss a little higher, but even though I served longer, he missed it! Then I said to myself, let me go for a deliberately high toss and see what happens, and I got a serve with Der Echte style pace, I and he missed that too!
youtu.be/jWJwPLIZ1N8?t=782
Finally, large whips in general are bad for serving short. But aggressive whips are always good. It's just that too often, people have a tendency to hit the ball when serving. Do not try to hit the ball forward. Let the rubber take care of that for you. One of the reasons I encourage people to stick with the ball bouncing pancake exercise is that it keeps you aware of what your rubber contributes at low impact speeds so it improves your touch. You get an idea of how much you can get into the ball at small impacts and can discern the difference between Tenergy and Karis, as an example.
