@ Azlan, thanks for starting this post. It is a great offering to help other people and inspire players giving us all something to practice while working on our serves more consistently.
@ Mr. RicharD:
I think, where your communications sometimes go wrong, has to do with attitude and personality in how you start your posts:
I kindly disagree with the motions and ball contacts and here's why.
So you started your post by basically saying, Azlan is wrong and everyone should listen to you instead of Azlan. Now maybe that is not your intention and I would rather give you the benefit of the doubt. And I don't think Azlan took it that way. But you are starting off very negatively and directing that negative remark towards someone who has provided information in the hope of being helpful to some of the players on the forum.
If your post started, like this instead: "Hey Azlan, that is a great technique and I think there are a lot of people out there who can benefit from it. And there are other techniques to accomplish this same effect. Here is how I do it and I was taught this by a coach who worked with the Chinese National Team....etc" then you are not creating an argument, and you are not presenting information as though other views are being criticized. You are simply stating another method that you feel is effective.
And since you do, very often start posts in an aggressive way, where you are saying someone else is WRONG, even if that is not really what you mean, it would make sense that sometimes people might get upset with you. I am sure you are coming from a good place in wanting to give information and help people, but very frequently you come off as though you think you are the ONLY authority on the subject and everyone else is wrong and you are often criticizing players who have been playing for longer than you and are at a higher level of play than you are. There are a few times where I saw that you started a post in a manner that was similar to the one I quoted above from this thread where the person you started off criticizing was a pretty high level player (professional level). I started realizing at a certain point that you mean well and that you don't even fully realize that you are starting off your posts by insulting someone. So I started ignoring that aspect of your posts and just reading the technical content that comes after. But it might be something worth looking at for you. It is a personality trait that I could see getting you into a lot of trouble and makes me understand this response from Yosua:
Good post, Sir Az!
Richard, there is reason why pros change the contact point on their serves.
Now you maybe could do it your way but I bet it won't get you to the top.
I've tried the same method as yours, turns out my no spin has backspin and my backspin is not heavy enough.
I have trained and tried the exact method Sir Az posted and I agreed with it, service is one of my strength in the game.
Talking about dwell time, the part of the racket is one key factor so you can't separate those two.
You heard a lot of people told you but I guess you are just stubborn, you even know that it is technically true. Its not because what they said (about racket's contact point) is not right but its you who don't want to change your mindset and train for it. The same goes to the pips discussion, you 'disagreed' pips because you can't play against one while in the same time you don't want to learn how to play against it.
Check this vid out, one of the greatest server:
Well I could hate math and physics for it is hard but I won't. I will learn.
Wow Yosua you took that whole debate out of proportion and never read the posts.
The funny thing is, you still don't get how you insulted Yosua in that pips discussion. Now I did read all the posts and you did come around, change your attitude and make yourself clear by the end. I understand what you ultimately said, but, at the beginning and in the middle of that discussion you did insult a lot of people without necessarily realizing it. So it is not necessarily what you mean, but your confrontational attitude (which you may not be aware of) and how you seem to try and present yourself as an authority on the subject even though you are really not a very high rated player. And regardless of what your official rating is, and what your actual rating may or may not be, I have seen video footage of you hitting and you are not a very high rated player. Nothing wrong with that. It is good to be working on getting better. I am not going to claim I am a great player. I personally think that anyone who is below 2000-2100 (USATT rating) is at best an intermediate player and people only start being actually really solid, good players somewhere between 2000 and 2200. So I am comfortable with the idea that I have a lot to work on, improve, get better at and learn. And in seeing video footage of you hitting with a robot and a person feeding you balls, I am comfortable with the fact that you are a very knowledgeable player with a strong opinion who has a lot of work to do in order to improve your game (footwork, stroke mechanics, weight transfer (too much to the left not enough forward), ball contact, timing, eye hand coordination etc etc etc).
And in the second video you can see the confrontational attitude. You had a point in telling your friend to keep the same camera angle and it was worth pointing it out, but it can be observed that you are confrontational in the way you ask your friend to hold the camera angle. That is why he was defensive in saying he was doing it, even though he was not keeping the camera angle. Your way of asking caused him to be defensive. Another person might have said it in such a way that he just did what was wanted without a defensive response.
All this being said, you have a lot to offer and I think a lot of people would be able to get more of what you have to offer if it was not such a frequent occurrence that you were starting things off by putting someone else down to try and prop yourself up.
