New servers almost always toss too high. It feels safe — give yourself lots of time, right? But a toss that floats up like a moonball is one of the sneakiest ways to make a serve worse, and the fix is a rule of thumb you can feel in ten tosses.
The honest answer
Toss the ball just a little higher than the top of your fully extended racquet reach — high enough that you meet it on the way up or right at the peak, at full stretch, and no higher. The classic test: if you didn't swing at all, the ball should drop back down into your tossing hand at about the height you released it. That's "catch height," and it's the target. High enough to reach tall, low enough that you're never standing around waiting for it.
Why too high is a real problem
A toss that climbs way up there feels generous, but it forces you to wait — and while you wait, your trophy position sags, your rhythm stalls, and you end up trying to time a falling ball, which is harder than timing a hanging one. The higher the toss, the more the ball is moving when you finally hit it, and a moving target is tougher to strike cleanly than one that's briefly hanging still. Pros who toss high have grooved the timing over years; a developing server is far better served by a lower, quicker toss that hangs where they can hit it.
What the camera can tell you
The tracker can't see the ball, so it never reports a toss height in feet — that would be a guess. But it reads something just as telling: the time from your tossing arm's full reach up to contact. Too long a wait is the moonball toss being loitered under; too short is a rushed serve where the trophy never really happens. There's a comfortable middle where the toss hangs just long enough for a real trophy and no longer. That window is read from your arm's timing, not the ball's flight — the honest proxy for whether your toss gives you a beat to load without leaving you waiting.
The fix — Toss-and-Catch Drill
Groove the height with the swing removed. Lay a racquet flat on the court at about one o'clock, just inside where you stand. Toss and — no swing — let the ball drop onto the strings. If it sails past, you're tossing too high; dial it down until it drops onto the racquet at a height you'd comfortably hit at full stretch.
Twenty tosses, fifteen-plus on target, straight arm, fingertip release. This trains both placement and height at once, because you can't groove the height without also grooving the release that controls it.
Then film a serve side-on and watch your arm-to-hit time settle into that comfortable middle. When the toss hangs right where you can reach it — no waiting, no rushing — the rest of the serve suddenly has room to work.