Improving a team’s serving is something that coaches of especially younger teams are always looking to do. Invariably, once raw strength is sufficient to get the ball over the net overhand, the biggest factor in serving performance is a consistent toss. The following question from a reader highlights this.
I coach a HS JV team. Each player has the potential to have great serves: they are strong and when the connect properly, their serves are rockets. However, they are inconsistent due to their toss. Their toss will sometime either be too low or to the side which creates a serve into the net or out.
What are your recommendations to help improve a perfect toss?
There are a couple of things I can suggest to help players with their toss.
Video
Record your players serving from either directly behind them or directly in front (behind is probably safer!). This will show quite clearly where players are tossing the ball, which is probably all over the place. Show them an example of a good toss, and then show them where there own tosses are in comparison (see the sandwich idea).
Short Serves
A lot of screwy mechanical things can come into play when players serve full-court because they are thinking about power. Have them serve from mid-court where power is not a concern. That way they can focus on consistent tosses and good ball contact.
Whenever I work with a lower level group, nearly every training session I feature what I called a serving warm-up. It’s simply players serving back and forth over the net in pairs starting just about the 3m line and gradually backing up to the end line. This both serves to warm-up their shoulders and to give them time to work on their mechanics. I would do this with any team where developing good serving technique is a priority.
I should note that even coaching professional players, as I did at Svedala, there are toss-related issues (saw them when working with German pro men as well). They aren’t usually as dramatic, and take on a different character, but they can be equally influential.
Skip tossing without serving
One thing I would not recommend is practicing tosses without actually hitting the ball. That’s fine to introduce the concept (e.g. “Place the ball in front of your hitting shoulder”), but it’s not useful for actually training the skill of serving. As the findings of this paper indicate, players toss the ball at a different height when just tossing it as compared to when they actually serve.
This all relates to the concept of task decomposition, which skill acquisition specialist Rob Gray talks about in this article. It’s where I got the other link from and includes a graph from that paper showing the difference in serve toss height.
See also How to teach the overhand serve to volleyball beginners and Why does my volleyball team miss serves?
And for more from Rob Gray, check out these videos. I’ve also reviewed his books How We Learn to Move and Learning To Be an “Ecological” Coach.
6 Steps to Better Practices - Free Guide
Subscribe to my weekly newsletter today and get this free guide to making your practices the best, along with loads more coaching tips and information.
