We’re 1-1 and it’s my turn to serve. I feel slightly nauseous.
I walk up to the baseline and repeat to myself the cues for the serve.
Toss the ball high and into the court.
Get into trophy pose.
Lean your left hip forward.
Bend your knees.
Let the racquet drop.
Throw your racquet upwards.
Hit with the edge.
Pronate at the last second.
Don’t turn your hips too quickly.
Stay loose.
Use the kinetic chain.
I look up to the sky, lift my tossing hand, and try to quiet my mind.
We were in a loosely organized doubles tournament in the Marina. O and C booked both Marina courts side by side and chatted on the roster and the seeding.
I was nervous, and I didn’t want to let C down. C is my golden retriever partner in crime in our tennis social club when following professional tennis but a menace on the court, hitting cross court angles and making her opponents run with no mercy.
But we had never played doubles together before. This was also the first time I had played alongside other tennis friends in this event and I was anxious about keeping up.
It was a chilly, windy night and I wore Wimbledon whites to match with C. That is, white tee and white shorts — I can’t remember the last time I wore shorts in public — but this was at night time and the sun wasn’t out.
I took up tennis during the pandemic, and spent the past year intentionally working on my serve. I realized after playing matches that I was pretty athletic, but my serve was holding me back. Worse, I fell into the pancake serve trap that so many recreational players fall into — holding the racquet like it is a frying pan and hitting the ball rather than pronating. I didn’t even know what pronation was before I learned about the serve.
In a tennis match, the serve is the highest-leverage stroke you have. It’s the only stroke you fully control, including the pace, spin, and location. It can be your biggest weapon, or crippling liability.
It’s also a ridiculous number of things to coordinate in a blink of an eye: the ball toss, legs, hips, racquet path, spin, contact point, and target. One thing goes slightly wrong and the whole motion falls apart.
Most rec players don’t really work on their serve. Understandably, they just want to play. I, unfortunately, wanted to do it right. Focusing on the serve was the obvious move.
I was willing to trade short-term match play for long-term upside.
I started working with an online coach who I discovered from his popular YouTube channel.
I hated the idea of paying $100-$120 per hour for someone to watch me practice in person. I didn’t want a highly paid babysitter. Online coaching, with its emphasis on video analysis and personalized drills, felt like the right middle ground.
By then, I had at least escaped the pancake grip.
We started off with an initial serve motion analysis. He sent back a personalized video breaking down my serve and side-by-side comparing it to the pros, then some drills to work on my weaknesses. I obediently followed them, recorded videos, and sent them back. He’d respond within a couple days with personalized video feedback and another set of drills.
The first six to eight months passed until I realized I was simply going through the motions — I’d book a court once a week, take videos, then send him clips back that I thought looked good. It was like showing up to a run club only once a week and running 3-6 miles, but expecting to be able to run a marathon after six months.
Deep down I knew this probably wasn’t enough to see meaningful change, but I wasn’t quite sure what to do. How exactly should I practice? How much time should I spend on the court? How many times should I do this drill? How long would it take to master this part? How can I tell if I am ready? Why is this taking so long?
I decided to enforce constraints on myself and take things more seriously.
I booked courts two to three times a week for 1.5 hours each, bought a portable tripod off Amazon to stow in my tennis bag, and lugged around a ball hopper of 80 tennis balls apologetically in Ubers. No, I told some drivers, I’m not a professional tennis player and no, I’m not a tennis coach. I wrote down a practice agenda each time, focusing on 1 or 2 core things to practice.
I’ve never seen someone on a court with a tripod camera recording and practicing serves.
People typically just practice serves blindly, without video analysis. But that’s actually the biggest rookie mistake. You think you may be serving or doing something one way, only to watch yourself on camera and realize you may have been doing something completely opposite or different than what you intended.
I’ve also never seen someone on court, with a tripod camera recording, practicing 5 serves at a time, then stopping to watch the playback. Except me.
People typically just serve baskets at a time and maybe set up cones for target practice. I wasn’t there yet, though.
If you’re not careful, you could spend hours practicing the wrong motion, the wrong technique, and ingrain the wrong muscle memory. And so there I was with the camera, with starts and stops and talking to myself on court and throwing up my hands in frustration at times.
I then went back home and re-reviewed each video clip to find out the best ones to send back to my coach. I wrote a quick summary of my practice intentions, the highlighted clips, and my thoughts for him to digest. This often took as much time, if not longer, than my actual practice. A week could be 4.5 hours on the court and the same analyzing videos. I know, I know, this is so extra.
The biggest point of frustration for me was how fragile every improvement felt. I would spend two or three weeks on one piece, finally feel like it clicked, then introduce the next cue and watch the first one fall apart. Toss timing, arm position, elbow up, pronation, loading my back leg, cocking my hip — every new layer seemed to break the layer before it.
It was very demoralizing. Even with a coach, even with countless YouTube videos promising to finally fix your serve, so much of it was trial and error: finding the cue or drill that finally made something stick.
My phone quickly amassed hundreds of practice videos, with the occasional clip favorited so I could find it among the many duds. I’ve never been so well acquainted with watching serves in slow motion. I thought I was going crazy. Am I doing this right? I felt stupid taking up so much time looking at practice videos.
I felt like I was quietly suffering without anything to show. Too perfectionist to try to get everything right — but not yet “ready for showtime”. Too busy telling everyone I was working on my serve, and still not ready yet to put it to the test with live matches.
And then I found myself in this doubles tournament with C.
Four seconds later, the ball hits the net.
During serve practice, it’s just me on an empty court with my tripod and hopper of balls. There’s no other person, and no pressure at all. I’m feeling loose, engaged, focused, in my contained environment where I control everything, even my mistakes.
Serving in match play is a completely different beast.
There is real pressure there, and the fear of double faulting is agonizing and embarrassing. It can really mess with your head. Am I not tossing the ball high enough? Am I too tight right now? Remember, smooth and relaxed. Breathe. Remember your cues.
Serving with a live person across the net is one thing, serving in doubles is another: two opponents across the net and your partner standing there relying on you to not implode.
OK miss I-am-focusing-only-on-serve-practice, let’s see if your serve actually wins points. Actually wins matches.
I tried not to think about how visible it was that my serves still lacked pace and bite. After all my talk about serve practice, no one could see the endless slog behind it: the video analysis, the starts and stops, the cues that worked until the next cue broke them, the infinite trial and error. Not pancakes, but not weapons, either.
Actually, the typical rec player wouldn’t have even noticed any of this — any of the past year in my head and on the courts — at all.
After all that “serve practice”, this was the best I could do? I hated how it looked on the outside.
My biggest fear came true: I had spent all this time practicing, quietly raising expectations for myself and everyone around me, only to fall apart the moment my work was tested.
We lost both times, got breadsticked twice, and ended up in last place.
C remarked out loud that she never thought we would come in last. I know she didn’t mean it maliciously, but inside I burned with shame. I let her down.
I was practicing the motion, but not the pressure.
I don’t think the year was wasted. I can easily break down someone’s serve so much more than I could a year ago. But the bigger truth is that I used solo practice to hide. That was the mistake.
It’s not that I’m bad at serves, or serve practice, per se. I just never put them to the test.
It also exposed a broader pattern in me — I like controlled environments where there are no surprises. Solo practice, video review, structured feedback, technical improvement, studying the thing, preparing before being seen.
What I dislike is the part where the work has to survive contact with other people. Because what if it’s not enough? What if I completely freeze and break down? What does that say about all that time spent? What does that say about me?
The longer I avoided the feedback loop, the more pressure I inadvertently created. Every private rep made the eventual public test feel bigger.
Putting it to the test was the only real measure I had.
I used to think pressure was the reward for being ready.
It turns out pressure is how you get ready.