Ben Shelton’s killer serve—and improving return—are representative of this moment in tennis

One of the more significant storylines at this year’s Australian Open was the effort Carlos Alcaraz made in the off-season to improve his serve. The theme echoed one from the previous year, when improvements Jannik Sinner made in his serving mechanics, including a switch to the “pinpoint” stance, helped elevate him to the No. 1 ranking.

On the women’s side, Coco Gauff brought relative unknown Matt Daly into her team last September. Daly is something of a serving specialist. The modifications he made, including a grip change and a simplified service motion, powered Gauff’s late-season surge and carried her into the new year. Meanwhile, Iga Swiatek has benefited from tweaking her serve, then doubled down on making further changes when she hired head coach Wim Fissette.

All four of the aforementioned players are at the absolute peak of the game. Yet here they are, not only working on their serves but making talking points out of their efforts, as if they were aspiring contenders instead of established titans.

The reason is simple: The greatly reduced margin of error for servers in the most basic confrontation in tennis—the one between server and returner.

In Melbourne, a reporter asked Gauff, whose serve fluctuates in efficacy, if she felt that serving a tennis ball is analogous to pitching a baseball. Her response was that the catcher might be a more appropriate analogy: “The catcher is usually the one that calls the signals. In tennis, you have to know the returner as well as the catcher [in baseball] needs to know the batter.”

After decades of evolution, even outstanding servers are no longer in command. The opening shot is no longer the stroke that stands apart from all the others the way the queen does from the other chess pieces. The return has become the antidote to the menacing serve. If you think of the two key shots as rivals, you’re talking IBM vs Apple, Yankees vs. Red Sox, Chevy vs. Ford, Celtics vs. Lakers, or Martina (the serve!) vs. Chris (the return).

The grail, of course, is to do both things extremely well. Among the men, Sinner is closest to the ideal state. He ranks No. 6 among return leaders and No. 4 among servers on the 52-week ATP Infosys leaderboard. Alcaraz, his presumed career rival, is No. 2 among returners but just No. 13 among servers. Small wonder he’s working on his pitch.

The player who best understands the serve-return dynamics at the moment may be Ben Shelton, the 22-year-old firebrand who lost to Sinner in the Australian Open semifinals. On a trip through New York in December, Shelton said:

I’d say that I’m not chasing [serve] speed as much as I was when I came out [as a rookie]. A lot of the guys on tour are pretty superhuman. I hit it 148 miles an hour, and if I miss my spot they hit it back. And if I just put it back in the court, they hit it back, with a lot of quality, at my feet. So a lot of times speed isn’t the answer. Ben Shelton

In addition to working on the other elements of a great serve—variety, placement, spin—Shelton is working hard to shed any suggestion that he’s a “servebot,” armed with a bazooka but unable to break rivals more than 5 to 7 percent of the time. By working on his return at the end of last year, Shelton has upped his 52-week break percentage to a respectable 14.4 percent. That’s only good for 77th place among ATP return leaders, but it’s almost 50 percent better than ace monster John Isner’s career percentage of 10.1.

Shelton is an excellent representative of this moment in tennis: A great server who has realized that power and pace are not the end-all and be-all, and that his killer shot must be backed up with a solid return game. The one-trick pony is an endangered species.

Great battles between server and returner began to emerge with the advance of racquet (and later, string) technology. While pre-Open Era players with exceptional serves were lionized—among them, Bill Tilden, Ellsworth Vines and Pancho Gonzlaez—great returners went largely unacknowledged. But that all changed in the mid-1970s, when Jimmy Connors harnessed the power in a steel Wilson T-2000 racquet (a frame that many other elite players couldn’t tame) and quickly developed a return that made him the Era’s first merciless serve-killer.

Since then, the nature of individual talent has dictated tidal swings in the face-off between serve-and-return. The contrast is by no means binary, but Pete Sampras was a paragon as a server, while some of the stiffest resistance he faced was from the brilliant returner Andre Agassi. The Ivan Lendl return was, in its own way, as impressive as the booming Boris Becker serve. The servers can claim Roger Federer for their own, but the returners get Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic.

It was very different story on the WTA side. For the longest time, the players—and perhaps more damagingly, the men who dominate the coaching ranks—wrote off the serve as the exclusive domain of men. The theory was that most women couldn’t generate enough power to make the serve a weapon. The serve was employed mainly as a rally starter, hence the emphasis on baseline consistency.

We’ve seen how profoundly that has changed. Aryna Sabalenka, Madison Keys, Elena Rybakina, Gauff, Swiatek, Caroline Garcia and other women have helped bring the WTA out of the serving dark ages. The return, always a focal point in women’s tennis, has kept pace and continued to get better—hence the new emphasis on maximizing the serve.

“I’m actually proud of my serve,” Madison Keys said after her victory over Sabalenka to win her first Grand Slam title. Keys notably tweaked her serve during the offseason despite owning one of the best in the sport.

“I feel like I kind of changed it kicking and screaming a little bit because it was always something that worked well enough, so why mess with it?”

Can you imagine any other great server saying such a thing these days when, as Stefanos Tsitsipas said in Melbourne, “The game has shifted more towards a physical game. I feel like the margins become smaller, meaning that you're not getting as many free points.”

And as we all know, there’s no free points quite like those earned with the serve—unless they’re the ones earned with a great return. It’s as good a cage match as you’ll find these days in sport, and only getting better.