Welcome to the serve drill video in this video, we're going to work on serve placement, serve placement is so important because it gives your serve a huge advantage because you can place the ball. Now you can attack your opponent's weaknesses. You can mix up the delivery of your serve, meaning the location on the court to keep them guessing, and it also gives you an opportunity to set your best shot up. 

So in this video, we're going to focus on how to place your serve better and the drills you should do to increase your placement while working on your serve. Now we go back to the fundamentals of the serve. You have to remember that the serve can be placed by remembering that the racket face at contact is going to direct the ball where you want it.

 The path as it goes through the ball, it's going to create the spin. We're not going to really focus on the path in this video. We're just going to focus on the racquet face at contact, and this drill is going to help you improve your placement if you do it enough times. So let's get started. 

What are you going to do for this drill is simply to go out to a court and set up a target. And the way I've divided this target in the beginning is just splitting one service box. So I'm serving to the do side and I've split the service box into a left side and a right side.

So basic placement, can I get it to the person's forehand or backhand? If you want to increase the difficulty of this and you really feel comfortable with this, you could break it up into three different zones, meaning the forehand, the body and then the backhand. 

But for right now, we're just going to start off with forehand or backhand. What we want to do is first serve and then see where the ball goes and then start adjusting the racquet face to get the ball to go exactly where we want it. So we're going to pick a spot, we're going to call it out. I'm going to go to the forehand side and serve there. If I do that, I'm going to continually try to serve it there again and again again to. 

I feel really comfortable. Then I'm going to say I'm going to go to the backhand side and then try that. The key with this drill is getting familiar with the muscle memory. You need to make sure as you go up and deliver your serve you know how it feels to hit that certain placement.

 And the only way you're going to do that is by practicing this way. So you develop those skills and those muscle memories. So every time you step up the line, you can trust that you can do this.

So let's go ahead and show you how it works. So I have a couple of balls here in my pocket and a couple of balls in the baseline. This is just for repetition. So right now, I'm going to aim for my opponent's forehand side. So all I'm going to do is step up to the line.

 And I hit the correct location now if I can continue to do this. This means I've pretty much got a knack for hitting that side. Now here's what would happen for most players. If you're not used to hitting the side, you probably hit something like this, meaning that I hit to the backhand side. 

So what? That tells me it contact my racquet face was facing more to the backhand side. And so what I now need to do is make a small adjustment at contact. So I'm going from the backhand side. I'm still aiming for the forehand side. 

Let's say I make that adjustment and I go too wide. This means my adjustment was too big and this is a good problem. This means you're adjusting and not just doing the exact same thing over and over again, and that's what you want to do. 

Keep adjusting back and forward until you hit the right target. Once you hit that target, you try to consistently rinse and repeat doing it again. So I've made two adjustments from going from the backhand side, from going wide to the forehand side, and let's see if I can catch it on the right side.

Oh, so I actually had the right direction, but it was a little too long. Meaning that a lot of times my racket face might be too open or might not be putting enough spin on the ball. If you're concerned about spin or different types of serves, make sure you check out the videos on the slice kick and flat serve. 

So what I'm going to do here is I'm just going to adjust my racket face a little bit more closed and see if I can hit that target. And there you go. I found the target, and that's exactly the process you want to go through. I recommend you go through this process and you can hit the same target at least six times if you get it six times in a row. 

You pretty much are starting to own that target and have that muscle memory you need to dependently step up in a match and hit the right target. So now I just hit the forehand side. I've done that, let's say six times, for example, now we're going to go to the exact same thing on the backhand side. 

So again, I hit my target, and if I missed the target, I would go through the exact same process on the forehand side, on the backhand side, going back and forth until I find that right muscle memory, which means I have the right racquet facing contact and then I will proceed to try to do this six times in a row once I own both of those targets.

Then you might jump to splitting up your targets into more precise locations, meaning that I would go from two targets to splitting the cord up into three zones now where I'd have to hit the forehand out wide. I'd have to hit the body, and then I'd also have to hit the backhand side. I would do this on both sides of the court, but before we get too ahead of ourselves, we want to make sure we can split the target in half on both sides.

So don't just stop once you do this on the do side, move over to the add side and do the exact same drill. Once you own both sides and you can hit not only the forehand and the backhand target, then split the targets into three separate locations, making sure that you can do this over and over again. 

And this is going to give you so much more confidence when you step on the court and you've got to go out there and hit a target dependably and know that you can do it consistently to win matches.