marc45
G.O.A.T.
long a complaint here, so...
big article in the NYT...
Serena Williams has a powerful one, but she is an
outlier. There is growing insistence in women’s
tennis that the standard of serving needs to improve.
By BEN ROTHENBERGSEPT. 3, 2017
Lindsay Davenport, a Hall of Famer who now works as a tennis coach and commentator, does not mince words about where she sees continuing deficiencies in women’s tennis, the sport in which she was ranked No. 1 in singles and doubles.
“It is appalling to me, so often, to go watch these ladies serve,” Davenport said. “They spend very little time on it. They don’t take pride in it, and it’s the one shot you have complete control of.”
big article in the NYT...
Serena Williams has a powerful one, but she is an
outlier. There is growing insistence in women’s
tennis that the standard of serving needs to improve.
By BEN ROTHENBERGSEPT. 3, 2017
Lindsay Davenport, a Hall of Famer who now works as a tennis coach and commentator, does not mince words about where she sees continuing deficiencies in women’s tennis, the sport in which she was ranked No. 1 in singles and doubles.
“It is appalling to me, so often, to go watch these ladies serve,” Davenport said. “They spend very little time on it. They don’t take pride in it, and it’s the one shot you have complete control of.”
- The serve, often seen as a vulnerability in the women’s game, is a strength of most top men on the ATP Tour, which leads to striking statistical discrepancies.
In 2016, only one woman, Serena Williams, won more than 80 percent of her service games; 35 ATP players broke that threshold. Seven women and 57 men won more than 70 percent of their first serve points. On second serves, six women won at least 50 percent of their points, compared with 57 men.
This sort of disparity has existed for decades and is often attributed to the physiological differences in height and strength between men and women. But there is a growing sentiment within women’s tennis that the standard of serving can and should improve. Many coaches are making it a point of emphasis, and the WTA Tour is commissioning studies on how players can serve better.
Davenport said she believed many top women had become too blasé about their service weaknesses.
“Why are you fine with getting broken?” she said. “You should take pride in holding your serve.”
The need to emphasize strong serving might seem surprising given that Serena Williams, whose serve is considered one of the best ever, has dominated tennis for most of the last two decades.
Her coach, Patrick Mouratoglou, said that coaches of lower-ranked players would normally try to model their players’ games after the best, but that the Williams sisters’ dominance with their serves was seen as an outlier by many players on tour.
“Everybody thought they were different,” he said. “They’re from another planet, those two, that’s what people were thinking.”
“Which they are,” he added, laughing. “That’s why it didn’t change the mentality.”
WTA Wants to Know Why
WTA officials have recognized the deficiencies in the serving of their constituents. Dr. W. Ben Kibler, an orthopedic surgeon from Lexington, Ky., serves as medical consultant for the WTA, and has worked with the tour in observing, analyzing and quantifying effective service technique.
“The idea is, Why is the serve so much less of a weapon in the women’s game than it is in the men’s game?” Kibler said. “We looked at many factors of the mechanics of the serve, and we did show significant differences in how the serve, mechanically, worked between males and females. So then we started looking at why that was, what were the differences.”
Studying videos of 150 female players and 50 male players, Kibler and his associates devised a rubric for grading the soundness of serve technique, awarding one point for satisfying each of nine components of an ideal service motion with scores ranging from 0 to 9.
The criteria are foot position, a knee bend of more than 15 degrees, hip counter-rotation, hip tilt, leaning, the angle of the back, trunk rotation, shoulder alignment and leg push.
“This doesn’t mean that everybody who has a score of 7 is going to win every tournament, or a 2 isn’t going to win some,” Kibler said. “But as an evaluation tool, it can be helpful.”
Kibler said he was not allowed to reveal individual players’ scores, but in the study, completed in December, the scores awarded to serving prowess strongly correlated to a player’s WTA ranking: 77 percent of top-25 players studied scored a 5 or higher; 50 percent of players ranked 26th-60th scored a 5 or higher; and only 12 percent of players ranked 61st-120th scored 5 or higher.
The largest disparity found by Kibler between male and female professionals was in pushing off with their back legs, which 75 percent of the men in the study did effectively compared with only 28 percent of the women.
“The point is that there are things we know the women are not doing that they are capable of doing,” Kibler said. “And it’s interesting, the women use that back leg really well on their groundstrokes. They’ll kill it. They’ll get on that back leg on the groundstrokes, but not on the serve. And you need to do that, because serve is the only time you have control of your body.”
Kibler hosted a seminar at the WTA tournament in Charleston, S.C, in April for coaches interested improving their players’ serves. It was advertised on a flier that said, “Interested in stroke biomechanics, improving serve performance and injury prevention?” He has hosted four such sessions and plans to hold several more.
Though generally more technically sound, men do not have uniformly perfect service motions. Stan Wawrinka, a winner of three Grand Slam titles since 2014, was named by several coaches as a top men’s player with significant room for improvement in his service technique.
“The men you’ll see, they’ll do things technically wrong, but because they’re so strong they’ll get away with it,” said Michael Joyce, who has coached several WTA players. “A lot of it is just because of brute strength.”
Joyce, who currently coaches Victoria Azarenka, has worked with younger players, and he said a pivotal divergence between boys’ and girls’ serving may happen in puberty, when boys are eager to show off their growing strength by blasting powerful serves in a way that girls cannot.
“Once the boys start to hit puberty and get stronger, all the sudden it’s like a macho thing: I’m going to step to the line and serve big and come to the net,” he said. “The mentality is just different.”
Because teenage girls do not have that same ability, Joyce said, they focus on other areas of their development instead. Boys quickly learn that having a robust serve is a necessity.
“Women don’t necessarily win with their serve, even in the juniors,” he said. “So it doesn’t become a huge priority. When I look back at when I was 14, 15 and started to play against older men, I knew I had to hold my serve.”
With shaky serves, many top women’s players have instead dominated with opportunistic returning. Angelique Kerber, who won the Australian Open and the United States Openlast year, rarely won free points on her serve even as she rose to the No. 1 ranking last year.
Roger Federer, who played mixed doubles for the first time in 15 years at Hopman Cup in January, said that the women he faced did not disguise the direction of their serves as well as most male opponents, but he marveled at the exceptional returning acumen of his partner, Belinda Bencic.
“I think that first coach that teaches you the serve is super important — maybe emphasis in the women’s game is not the No. 1,” Federer said. “They spend much more time returning. I feel, that we don’t do at all. I don’t, anyway. I don’t practice my return at all.”
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