A lot of the discussions here involve the high level serve. Pro players swing at the ball but also rotate their upper arm to accelerate the racket to impact. The rotation itself supplies significant racket head speed that the majority of tennis players don't get. The rotation motion is not as well understood by most players. I believe about half of the servers that have posted videos are not using a serve including significant upper arm rotation, the joint motion known as
internal shoulder rotation.
Your text description of your serve is hard to follow. A video would show it well although the faster parts of your motion require high speed video. If you can video it in direct sunlight the motion blur will be reduced.
High level slice serve -
(corrected "kick" to slice)
https://vimeo.com/27528347
The racket head speed is increased by very rapid upper arm rotation - internal shoulder rotation - and the racket moves - mostly horizontally - across the back of the ball. Some severs may contact more on the side of the ball.
To view in stop-action single-frame on Vimeo hold down the shift key and use the arrow keys. If it jumps to another video due to Vimeo error please let me know.
A Toly composite pictures of a high level serve showing the details of the racket motion.
Chas, I modified your video see
http://youtu.be/KdsCmCoeQVA and picture.
Unknown player Flat/Slice Serve Back from Chas Tennis video
Maybe I should improve them somehow?
You can see the racket at a position of edge on to the ball. At roughly that point the arm is rapidly rotated using ISR. The face of the racket is an indication of the angle of ISR (plus also any forearm pronation).
