When your serves keep thudding into the net, the instinct is to aim higher — swing more upward, brush up the back of the ball, hit it out toward the fence. Sometimes that helps for a serve or two. Then the nets come back. That's because the real problem usually isn't your aim. It's where you're meeting the ball.
Why height beats aim
Picture the geometry. If you strike the ball low — barely above your head, or worse, in front of your face — you're hitting up from below the level of the net's advantage, and even a well-struck ball is fighting a downhill road to the service box. Every honest inch of reach you add tilts that road in your favor: the ball starts higher, so it can travel flatter and still clear the net, and you get more of the box to aim at. Reach doesn't just help clearance — it hands you angle and margin for free.
That's why the fix for a netted serve is almost always up, not a change of aim. Raise the contact point and the net stops being in the way.
What the camera measures
CoachVision reads contact reach as how high your hitting wrist rises above your head at the strike, in torso-lengths — measured against your own body, so a tall server and a short one are judged fairly, and never in feet or mph. It's pure reach: are you meeting the ball at full stretch, or collapsing your arm and hitting it low? A low number here, especially riding alongside a shallow racquet drop, is the serve that keeps finding the net.
Two things steal reach, and both are upstream. A racquet that never dropped means you're pushing from a bent arm instead of throwing from full extension. And legs that never load mean you're serving flat-footed instead of driving up into the ball. Fix the reach at its source and the net problem tends to solve itself.
The fix — Serve from Trophy
The fastest way to feel a high contact point is to delete everything before it. Start at the trophy — toss arm up, racquet cocked, elbow at shoulder height — and serve from there with no wind-up. This isolates the drop-and-drive so the only thing you can do is let the racquet fall and then reach up tall to meet the ball. No wind-up means no rushing, no collapsing, no shortcut — just the fall and the reach.
Fifteen of these, thinking one thought: touch the ball as high as I possibly can. Feel the arm go fully long at the top, the contact point high and slightly in front of you. You'll be surprised how much higher you can meet it when the wind-up isn't stealing the moment.
Then film a side-on serve and watch the reach number climb. When you're meeting the ball at full stretch, the net stops being a wall and starts being a formality — and you'll have earned that with reach, not with a nervous, careful aim that falls apart under pressure.