Your tennis serve, measured from toss to contact.
Trophy position, toss and contact height, read from one phone clip, with the one thing to work on first and a drill for it.
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What the coach measures
How high your tossing arm reaches at its peak, read from your arm, not the ball. A long, tall toss arm is the platform the serve stands on.
The time from your tossing arm’s full reach up to the hit. Enough for a real trophy, not so much that you’re waiting under a moonball. Studies time the serve from the moment the ball leaves the hand, a little earlier than this, and find strong and average servers take about the same time, so read this as rhythm: a rushed or stalled serve is worth fixing, but the time itself is not a measure of how good the serve is.
The bend in your hitting arm at the trophy. Around a right angle stores the throw; a straight arm at this checkpoint has nothing left to release. Top-ranked professional servers hold about 97° here and lower-ranked professionals about 69°, but the two groups overlap heavily, so read this as a shape that is right or wrong, never as a ranking.
Where your hitting elbow sits against your shoulder line at the trophy. Level is the checkpoint. A drooping elbow is the first domino of the tray.
How high above your head you meet the ball, in body-scale units. Reach is worth having, but it is not what separates good servers from great ones: the top-40 WTA players in the one study that splits by ranking meet the ball at 2.71m against 2.68m for lower-ranked professionals, a difference of three centimetres. What the legs buy is racquet speed, not height.
How much your hips actually rise from the deepest knee bend to the hit. The load is only worth what it launches.
A category the clip can't show clearly comes back blank rather than guessed.
The report, start to finish
Explore it: this is the layout you get. The numbers below are a worked example, not a recording of someone's clip.
Practice you can choose
On a clear practice court, choose a comfortable preparation before the serve you already know.
How to film it
- ✓ Phone at chest height, 15-20 feet away at the sideline and fixed, portrait - you should stand about a third of the frame tall, head to feet. Below a sixth the clip is usually rejected
- ✓ Whole body, racquet, AND the toss in frame - leave headroom above your reach
- ✓ Nobody holds the phone - the leg-drive read is dropped on a moving camera
- ✓ One serve per clip works. Film 3 to 5 serves in one clip so we can check your consistency. Start before the first toss and let the clip run past the last landing
- ✓ Normal playback speed, not slo-mo - toss-to-contact is timed straight off the clip, so a slowed-down serve reads as a slow serve. 60 fps is fine as long as it isn't your camera's slo-mo mode
- ✓ Sun behind the phone, not behind you
Fix your tennis serve
- The All-Arm Serve: Why Muscling It Gives You Less
- Bent Toss Arm: the Quiet Reason Your Toss Scatters
- Can AI Really Check Your Tennis Serve? What Gets Measured: and What Doesn't
- Contact Point Too Low? Reach Is the Cheapest Pace You'll Ever Buy
- The Continental Grip: the Invisible Fix Behind the Racquet Drop
- Dropping Elbow at the Trophy: the First Domino of the Tray
- Your First Tennis Serve: a Practice Plan From Zero
- Flat, Slice and Kick: What Changes in Your Serve (and What the Camera Can't See)
Your first measured serve is one clip away
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