#serving help

Your toss is really important. It’s hard for me to explain how high or how low to toss just through words on the internet, but you want it to be a little above your head. Make sure you’re also tossing in front of your right shoulder instead of just straight up. You don’t want to have to lean to the side in order to hit the ball. 

It’s really important that you keep your wrist locked. It’s a lot like giving a high five, it’s gonna be a pretty lame high five if your wrist is floppy. It’s the same with serving. Keep your hand open and wrist locked. Someone should be able to push on your hand and it shouldn’t move. You want to contact the ball up high, don’t wait for it to come down. 

A really good way to practice this is to get a ball and find a wall. Stand about an arms length away from the wall and just toss the ball up and contact it like you would serve. But what you’re going to do is trap the ball in between your hand and the wall. You want to make sure it’s up high and that your wrist doesn’t move. Just do this over and over. If you don’t understand what I just explained, let me know and I’ll make a video. 

The movement will be awkward at first and in all honesty it probably won’t go over the net at first. This just means you have to get used to the motion. Do not use incorrect form just because you’re getting frustrated.

Main things: high toss, high contact, locked wrist. 

Then there’s your toss. It’s really hard for me to explain how your toss should be, but a few things on it regardless. Make sure you’re tossing in front of your right shoulder and not merely straight up on your left side. If you have to lean to the side in order to contact the ball, you need to fix your toss. Then there’s also the matter of not making it too high or too low, but that’s really hard to explain via text. 

What we’re aiming for is a basic float serve which means you want it to have as little movement as it’s going through the air (no topspin). In order to do this, you have to make sure your wrist is locked. Make sure your hand is open and fingers spread out. If someone were to walk up to you before you contacted the ball and shake your arm, your hand should not move. If they push on your finger tips, your wrist should remain locked. You might have heard this analogy already, but it’s a lot like giving someone a (good) high five. You wouldn’t let your wrist fall or anything other than keep it locked when you would go to give a high five, so don’t do that when you serve. 

The last is make sure the ball is in front of you. (This is all projectile stuff if you’re in physics). It has to do with the angle that you contact the ball. If you’re standing under the ball, you’re going to get a really easy/awkward “lollipop” serve. If you keep the ball in front of you (not out of your reach, but in front) then when you contact the ball it goes faster and more directly to its destination. 

I highly recommend against starting from the endline and trying to serve over the net. When you start with that, you’re too focused on getting the ball over the net than you are with the proper technique, which will slow down the process and just get you more frustrated. I would start at the ten foot line and just focus on the technique of it. Yeah we want it to go over the net, but it doesn’t matter if your technique is wrong. Once you’re able to do it (consistently) from the ten foot line, go back to twenty feet and eventually to the end line. 

A way you can work on it at home is to find a wall (with a ball) and stand about arms length away from it. Toss the ball up like your going to serve and contact the ball, but trap it between your hand and the wall. This works on repetition with technique, contacting the ball at a high point, keeping your wrist locked, and strengthening the muscles that are used to serve, because your body probably isn’t used to the motion. And remember, the idea isn’t to hit it as hard as you can, it’s to trap it.

But that’s a huge thing to remember when you’re playing volleyball. If you don’t have the technique down and you try to just whack the snot out of the ball, it’s not going to work because you don’t have the fundamentals down.