The Never-Ending Serve Quest: Top players shift focus towards improved deliveries

John Isner and Ivo Karlovic, the two most prolific ace producers in recorded history, both retired recently (cumulative total: 28,198 aces). But while the great smokeshow may be over, the serve once again is becoming a focal point at the highest level of the game.

Heading into the new year, Jannik Sinner made a significant adjustment in his motion, abandoning the platform stance in favor of the “pinpoint” approach. The upgrade played a notable role in Sinner’s (perhaps) epochal mastery of defending champion Novak Djokovic in the Australian Open semifinals. Stefanos Tsitsipas also made a similar adjustment in his own serve.

Among the WTA players, Iga Swiatek’s off-season commitment to ironing out some kinks in her service motion paid dividends as the year got underway.  During the Australian Open, much was made in the U.S. media about Andy Roddick’s intervention with Coco Gauff, a session that, among other things, left Gauff with a more reliable and effective service toss.

Note that these folks aren’t the game’s dogsbodies, looking to lock down a living on the tour. They are four of the biggest, established stars in tennis, trying to squeeze every drop of advantage out of the most advantageous shot in tennis. Think about it: Serve well enough and you can actually win a match without ever having to set foot inside the lines on a tennis court.

This is a detail people seem to have forgotten in recent times, during which the serve return became the deadliest and perhaps the most acclaimed shot in tennis, as well as the tennis connoisseur’s shot of choice. It was a shift driven by the evolution in racket-head size and frame materials, along with incremental advances in string composition, all of which leveled the playing field that once was tilted heavily in favor of servers. And let’s not forget the return friendly, game-wide slowing of surfaces—a reaction to those epic (and to some, tiresome) serving contests of the late 1990s.

Never mind the aces: a serve that reliably sets up a plus-one blast or makes it easier to take control of the rally may be the most important tool in the box.

But the pendulum is swinging back, partly for the same reasons and due to some of the same factors that helped lift the return to a form of high art. The game nowadays is rally-based and physically grueling in a way that the forebears of the Big Three would have been hard put to imagine. And that puts a premium on ending points as quickly as possible—something best accomplished by a great serve. Points won with no great expenditure of effort have become the most prized of all these days, the equivalent of two-dollar bills in more ways than one.

Great serving doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing as it did during the ace-centric days of yore, either. Blazing deliveries of 135 mph or more certainly help the cause but, more and more, given the quality of returners, great serving is about other things, like clever targeting, and the judicious use of spins and pace. That’s why even the Grand Slam champions continue to sandpaper their serving technique. Never mind the aces: a serve that reliably sets up a plus-one blast or makes it easier to take control of the rally may be the most important tool in the box.

In a signal moment, Novak Djokovic’s loss in the semis to Jannik Sinner Down Under represented the first time in the Serbian titan’s 415-match Grand Slam career that he did not earn even a single break point.

“That stat says a lot,” Djokovic told reporters after the final. “I mean, first of all, he was serving very accurately. He was very precise.”

Great returners now have deeper respect for precision than power, although it’s pretty hard to beat a combination of the two. Daniil Medvedev lost three of his five matches with Hubert Hurkacz before he claimed their five-set barnburner in Melbourne to level their history. After the match, Medvedev suggested that Hurkacz is one of the top “two or three” servers in the game.

“In my opinion,” Medvedev said, “he (Hurkacz) serves bigger than most other guys. I would compare his serve to something like Nick Kyrgios—it’s very precise, and at the same time strong.”

Great serving rests on the tripod of power, precision and variety. Gauff, the quick study, has picked up on this to great effect. She isn’t even 20-years old, but she’s already developed a sophisticated understanding of the serve and the way to extract the most benefit from it. Cracking a big one at 130 mph? She is so over that.

“I don't want to go mach-20 every serve,” Gauff explained at the first Grand Slam of the year. When asked if she considered serving as analogous to pitching in baseball, she replied that catching might prove the more useful analogy. “The catcher is usually the one that calls the signals,” she said. “In tennis, you have to know the returner as well as the catcher [in baseball] needs to know the batter. Luckily in tennis we only have to focus on one person at a time—not a whole lineup.”

The great ace machines may have fallen silent, but the quest to squeeze the most out of the serve has never been pursued with greater vigor.