One of my favorite serves learned in the beginning for most recreational players, and it's still effective at a really high level is the slice serve. The reason why this serve is so effective is because of a lot of things. ¨A¨, When you learn to create spin on the ball, you're able to swing more aggressively at the ball, which gives you more confidence. 

You don´t have to worry about the ball as much because you know you can generate spin to bring the ball down into the court.

¨B¨ that spin also generates curve. So a lot of players don't like seeing the ball move away from them, which means they have to have better footwork to hit the shot.  And if they have to have better footwork, means, the shot's going to be more difficult. And these are some of the reasons why I like the slice and like teaching the slice to most new players and even more advanced players if they don't have a slice.

 Now, one of the big concerns and myths that I think about the slice is that players think they're carving around the ball to get the ball to curve, and that's inaccurate. You're not carving around the ball, you're really presenting the racket face, which we're going to talk about in one second. So the three concepts you need to really understand to hit a slice serve is number one, you need the right grip. Now, a lot of players get stuck in this frying pan grip. And we've talked about this in the flat serve module.

But here's the thing you have to have or something close to the continental grip. And this again allows you to send the edge through the ball. And the reason this is so important is because you can really accelerate your racket in this direction. And if you can accelerate it in this direction fast, you can really aggressively swing towards the ball.

Whereas if you have a frying pan grip and you're going this direction, what's going to happen is you have all these different angles where the ball could either go a long, long, long or more long until you finally hit this angle. And then it has to be perfect and you don't have a lot of margin for error when you're using the frying pan grip. 

So how do we find the continental grip? It's just like how you would hold the hammer. So if you hold the racket just vertical, just like this, take your hand and put it right here and just do a couple knocks like that, like you're doing a hammer and you have the continental grip. Now, if you want to know a little bit more specifically, take this knot here of your hand right below your pointer finger and put that pretty much on the top edge bevel.

So we have this flat and then this bubble here, that's where you want your continental grip to start, and this will start you on the process of really taking your slice serve to the next level. 

Now, number two, you got to understand the racket, face and racket path.Maybe you've heard this before, but the racket face sends the ball where it's going to go. Bar none. Wherever the rack of face is looking at contact, that's where the ball is going to go.

 So if you try to hit a serve and it's going along, guess what that means when you're making contact, the racket faces to open again if it goes too low. That means when you're making contact, the racket face is too close. 

So if we have that down the path and this is where the slice really, really comes in handy, but it's also tricky, and the path is very different from what a lot of players think. This is where when you start learning to hit spins in the beginning, it doesn't quite make sense because you're going to swing away from the target. Yet the ball is going to go somewhere different from where you're swinging.

 And this is where you really have to understand the racket face and the racket path. So what I mean is this I'm going to instead of swinging towards my target, I'm a swing away from my target, generally cutting a 90 degree angle. And by swinging this way, in the beginning, a lot of players start swinging and the ball jets off to the side and they're like, Oh, I don't want to do this, I serve any stuff anymore. It's awful.

 But if you go a little bit longer and understand that, hey, I got the slice, but the ball's not going in the right direction, what it really means is while I'm making contact the rackets looking in this direction, so we just need to adjust our hand a little bit and keep swinging this way when we're thinking about the path.

Once we get to the trophy and we're going to drop, we're going to swing in this direction, not towards our target, not along the baseline, but right in between making sure that our racquet face is looking at our target at contact.

 This creates the racquet face sending the ball in the direction that we want while the path creates the spin that'll have the ball curve. And this is so, so, so important to get used to understanding this, because when you can add spin to the ball, you can add more safety, more margin. You can accelerate and really attack the ball with a sense of safety and margin by the spin. 

Now, one big mistake a lot of players make when they're doing the slices as they go through, they start pulling their shoulder around and now look what happens. The path goes towards my target versus having the shoulder stay sideways a little longer and have the strings looking towards my target while the racquet path goes away from my target. 

It's really important that you understand the racquet path isn't going to line up with the target. You want the racquet face to line up with the target while the racquet path is going away from the target, and that's going to create the spin you're looking for.

Now it's time to take some action steps towards your side. Serve now. Remember, the slice serve really comes down to the racquet path through the ball, and really, it's not through the ball. So just imagine right now this would be a flat type racquet path going towards my target and this would be a kick. 

Going along what would be the baseline, but for a slice, we want to go halfway between as we're going halfway between. This sets the brush of the ball. Now what's key here is making sure that the racquet face is pointing where you want the ball to go. 

So the very first exercise I want you to do is just actually not working on serving but grabbing the racquet here and dropping the ball. And what I want you to get used to doing is just brushing the ball on the side. Get used to this motion of brushing compared to many people. When they kind of start with this drill, they just tap the ball and you can hopefully hear the difference of when I'm coming this way, I'm brushing the ball and this brush. 

Is really important, because what we want to do is take this brush and take it over your head, so I want you to do at least 10 bowls where you're brushing from the side here. What you should be seeing is as I'm brushing the bowl kind

Of jets off this way. But the bigger thing that you're focusing on is the spin you're getting just by brushing the ball this way, but you want to avoid again is just hitting straight down. Now the next part of this action stuff is taking this brush action that we did on the ground and starting to implement that overhead. 

Now again, I don't want you to be concerned about where the ball's going. So the courts this way. So I am purposely set the camera right here so you can really see this angle. I want you to really focus on pulling the racquet on this line. So it looks like this. And what I want you to know is you don't necessarily have to do your entire serve.

Like if you have a full motion or if you want to start with a straight up, that's totally fine. Either way, the biggest component to having a slice serve is getting the path right. So we're just going to go through a couple of motions. I'm going to start like this and have my racquet going off to the side.

Just like this, OK, what we're going to do is add the ball to it. Now,the first big mistake that players make when they start adding the ball is as they're going to the side, they start turning into the court and you can see how it took my racquet off that line of just staying on the side. 

So we want to really focus on staying on the side and avoiding turning in towards the court here. So when we use the ball, what's going to generally happen because we're not really focused on the racquet face,is since the racquet is coming at this angle, the ball's going to jet off there and that's totally fine as long as it  has spin. So this is what it look like.

I'll start here and all I'm going to do is slice the ball. If it goes in the net, no problem. But hopefully what you can hear is a bunch of spin being generated because of this racket path and you have to practice this until It feels really natural to get the spin that you want on the ball.

 One of the big mistakes that players generally coming and trying to do this is they start coming under the ball too much. So they start carving kind of too low and it gets spin. But it's actually underspending and not the side spin that we want or the slice that we want. We want to make sure as a reaching up or reaching all the way up and getting on the side of the ball and making sure that we're swinging on this path.

Now from here, this is where we have to start adjusting our racquet face. So just like how you have your continental grip and you can roll the wrist around just like this, this is what we want to do while we're in the air. We're going to be rolling that wrist around while the racquets coming to the side.

 Now, once we get the idea of rolling the racquet face, make sure that at contact your racquet face is looking at the service box. Now again, I'm in the middle of the court. I don't want to have to add too much power, but you're going to constantly make these adjustments to make sure you're getting closer and closer to the surface box.

So as I'm doing this, I'm going to make sure my swing is going towards the camera here and I'm adjusting my racquet face, OK? And if you find that the ball is going to right or to left, continue to make adjustments to the opposite side, so meaning if it goes to left, I need to adjust my racket to the right and if it goes to right, I need to adjust my racket to the left. 

Continuously do this as long as you get the ball in and then you're going to work your way back to the baseline, slowly adding more swing speed as you get further back. If you find yourself hitting the net, one big key to that is that your toss might be too far in front, which is changing your racket face to look too far down. 

Make sure your toss is over your hitting arm, shoulder and probably about even with my head. What I mean by even is where I reach up, even with my head over my hitting armed shoulder here. So from a side angle, you're tossing it right here. You don't need to toss it too far, and you definitely don't need to toss it too far back. 

If you're tossing it to back, it's going to probably open up the racquet face a little bit. So again, those are going to be equal adjustments you're going to have to make to make sure the ball is going out.

In summary. Number one, you have to have the grip. The grip is such a crucial part for any serve, but especially for the slice serve. Is there a slight variation and how and where you might have your hand? Yes, but if you really want to take full advantage of the slice, you want to have a continental grip.

 Number two, you got to understand the racket face and the racket path. When you understand these two things, it opens up a world of placing the ball in different locations around the box with different types of spin. Remembering that the racquet face is always going to send the ball in the direction, and the racket path is going to create the spin and we want to combine these things. 

One of the things that makes the slice serve a little bit more difficult in the beginning is that concept that I'm going to swing away from my target and the ball is going to go in a different direction that I'm swinging. Once you get this and you get over, this is going to really open up your eyes to how the slice serve can be really effective. 

Number three, mix it up.Don't just hit one. Serve one placement all the time. Make sure you're focusing on learning all the serves because what really makes a great server is the ability to mix up between flat slices and different serves. 

The more you can mix up your serve, the more you can give your opponent this feeling of unease because they don't know what serves going to come. And the more they don't know what serve is going to come is, the more you're going to win points because you're not going to be ready for the type of serve you're hitting. 

The other nice thing is, once you find out maybe that the opponent has a weaker side, you can only slice to that side. And it makes it much easier than the flat serve because you have so much more margin. 

By putting the spin in the slice on the ball, the ball is going to have more control and might not go as fast, but it's still going to have a lot of pace. And with the accuracy, you'll really be able to pick on your opponent's weaknesses and really challenge them to hit a great return.