Tip of the Day: Get more kick out of your second serve

You hear it all the time: You’re only as good as your second serve. Perhaps that’s an overstatement, but it’s tough to advance in the tennis ranks if your second serve is inconsistent and attackable. That’s where developing a strong topspin kick serve can help. Not only will putting topspin on the serve make it more dependable, but the resulting jumpy, tricky bounce makes it much tougher to return. Having a good kicker will solidify your second serve, and work as an effective changeup on first serves as well. If you’re looking to develop a wicked twister, keep these tips in mind.

Adjust your grip

If you want to put spin on your serve, you need to be holding the racquet with a Continental grip. This allows you more freedom in your wrist and ability to pronate the forearm to square the racquet face at contact. However, to develop a serve with lots of kick, you need to take it a tiny step further. While keeping your fingers essentially in the same spots, slide the heel of the hitting hand a smidge towards a backhand grip. This closes the racquet slightly and makes it easier to generate spin on the serve.

Move the ball toss

On flat and slice serves, the ball toss should be out in front of the body. If you were to let the ball drop, it should bounce inside the court, well in front of your feet. The kick serve requires a toss with a different flight plan. The ball needs to be closer to your body, ideally directly above you. If you let the toss bounce, the ball should land somewhere between the top of your head and your dominant ear. This positioning will allow you to better hit up the back of the ball to create the spin. Avoid tossing the ball too far to your left (right for lefties) as this adds a lot of stress to your back and hitting shoulder.

Adopt the proper hitting action

This is undoubtedly the trickiest part of the kick serve. You’ve got to alter your swing path and arm motion in order to strike the ball properly. Instead of swinging toward the net making contact with the back of the ball at full extension like a flat serve, you accelerate the towards the side fence, hitting up and out on the ball. If the back of the ball were a clock face, you’d be brushing across the back of it at a 7-to-1 o’clock motion (5-to-11 o’clock for lefties). The racquet head should follow through and finish by your dominant knee rather than across your body. It’s a difficult thing to get right, even for more advanced players, and it helps to break it down into digestible parts.

“First thing you should do is not even think about incorporating the legs,” says Patrick McEnroe who works with juniors on their kick serves at his family’s academy. “Just work on the arm and hitting action. Start with the racquet in the trophy position and concentrate on the up and out motion, with the wrist accelerating super-fast to the side. Then gradually work in the rest of the motion.”

Go after the shot

For the kick serve to have some fangs, you need an aggressive mindset. Too often, recreational players slow their arms down. It’s generally a second serve—they lose the point if they miss it—so they're hesitant to let the racquet go. Ironically, this makes it a less dependable serve because there’s less spin to bring the ball down safely in the service box. If the serve does happen to go in, it doesn’t have much action on it and sits up for the opponent to take a rip.

You need to accelerate the racquet as though you’re hitting a first serve. The truth is, if you hit the kick serve properly, you can’t swing hard enough. The more spin you apply to the ball, the faster it will dive down into the court. Taking a more offensive approach may result in a few mishits and double faults along the way, but in the long run you’ll develop a kick serve you can count on.