Momentum Exclusive: Serving for Success

I’ve often heard it said that matches are won and lost on the serving line. That no matter what the level is, it still comes down to a serve and pass game. Coaches will explain away a loss by saying that they just missed too many serves, or that they didn’t serve tough enough to put their opponents in trouble.

Coaches sometimes deliver mixed messages to their athletes, often resulting in confusion on the baseline.   Direction to go hard and be aggressive all the time, coupled with don’t miss back-to-back, or never more than 5 serving errors in a set or match.  Which is it? What is the right formula for success in serving? 

Let’s take a deep dive into serving. 

This article poses a number of questions for your reflection and a whole host of thoughts on what should go into your serving profile, philosophy and delivery plan. Let’s start with the most basic question. 

What are your athletes, or better yet, each athlete capable of?   

Are you looking to use that established foundation as the platform for your serving profile, so that you essentially work in a status quo mode, and just try to improve consistency, accuracy and velocity?   Are you looking to expand the server’s repertoire and take them beyond their current comfort zone, knowing that you may have short term loss for long term gain, and probably more errors as well; essentially hoping it will reap rewards down the road.

The psychological make-up of each athlete may also come into play here. 

Some athletes get very beaten down, in terms of their own confidence, when they are making errors.  Errors make self-critical athletes uncomfortable.   Other athletes are essentially the opposite.  Aggression and confidence abound, and you just want to let them loose.   How well do you know, and do you consider, the psyche of your players?

What is the purpose of the serve?   

Is it to simply put the ball in play? Is it to try to make it difficult for your opponent to run their preferred offense, and if so, what is that preferred offense? Is it to score points? Is this different for each of your servers? Is it one approach and philosophy for your entire team?   Hopefully, as you read on, it will help you decide what approach you want to take and how you will best deliver your plan to maximize effectiveness while minimizing confusion and uncertainty for your athletes.

The most rudimentary way is to identify and serve or ‘target’ the opponent’s weakest passer.  If that is your preferred strategy, then your first goal must involve improving accuracy, followed by the degree of difficulty.   In other words, are you willing to give up serving ‘toughness’ in order to ensure you pick off your preferred target?   That is different than approaching serving from the perspective of serving ‘tough’ and hopefully hitting your target most of the time.  You need to figure that out, so it is clear to your servers.   Do they sacrifice accuracy in the name of challenging the passers, or do they sacrifice velocity/difficulty in order to hit targets accurately?

Also, does this vary by opponent or by rotation and if so, what are the deciding factors?

If you are past the stage where serves are merely regarded as the way we initiate play and you are moving towards trying to take opponents out of their comfort zone, or out of their system with your serves, then you need to look at how you are going to do that.

There are multiple ways to put stress on the opponent’s reception.   The first, as mentioned above, is to serve the weakest passer.   The second is to target seams between the passers, which also requires accuracy.  For that to be effective however, the server also needs a reasonable velocity and/or float on their serve.   This requires moving your training forward from accuracy to improved velocity and trajectory, whether it comes from a float, a jump float, a spin serve or a hybrid.

Beyond fixed targets such as an identified weak receiver or a designated seam, the target may be specific to what you are trying to eliminate or reduce from the opponent’s offensive profile and are likely to vary by rotation.   Common tactics in this realm include things like:

• Serving over the middle hitter’s back so that they have more trouble tracking the pass, or even interfering with their line of approach.
• Serving short to position 4 so the left-side player can’t approach as fluidly as they might like
• Serving to 2 or 1 so the setter must deal with a ball that is coming from beyond their left shoulder. 

The most aggressive approach to serving is when the job of the server is to try to create points directly from the service.   Taking a big ‘rip’ on the ball, serving the edges of the court with high velocity, and driving the serve low and with a lot of pace and movement are all keys to this.  Spin serves with a ‘tail’ (side spin) and huge velocity while also hitting perimeters tends to reap the most points, but they also garner the most errors.  You may want an ace-to-error ratio measurement to serve as a performance indicator here.  Perhaps something like +2 for a direct point, +1 for producing a poor pass, 0 for serves passed well, -1 for errors that are ‘good errors’ and -2 for ‘bad errors’.  (A good error being just long, wide or hitting the tape, but with good velocity and a bad error being into the middle of net or very long/wide while not challenging)

I remember watching the Tokyo Olympics this past summer, when the USA men were battling to stay alive. Their play was on par, in my opinion, with their opponents, but they missed so many serves. Those missed serves alone gave away almost a whole set and the Americans really didn’t give themselves a chance. Afterwards, there was so much chatter on social media about this that it got me thinking about how you decide on how much serving risk to take.

Before we breakdown the risk-reward analysis, I’d like back up and talk a bit more about serving philosophy and profile.

Earlier in this article I mentioned that it can be confusing to athletes when they receive mixed messages.  Sometimes this is done entirely unintentionally.   I remember observing an established coach who spent quite a bit of his training session working on trajectory and velocity.  He explained to his athletes the importance of ‘tough’ serving and set up a very high volume drill with receivers so the athletes could work on mastering more advanced serving. He praised them afterwards, citing the quality of what he saw, as vastly improved. However, his final drill of the session was 25 serves without an error, which produced loopy soft serves designed to complete the task.   When I questioned that final drill in our discussion afterwards, he explained that he wanted them to perform their serves under ‘pressure’.   This suggested to me that this coach (and many coaches I have seen) do not have a clear approach to serving and that as a result, is isn’t surprising that athletes are confused.

What is the right serving philosophy and approach, for your team?

I believe that if your intent is to, at a minimum, produce ‘bad’ passing, you need a serving profile that keeps your opponent off balance.  By having a choreographed variation in types of serves, trajectories, velocities, locations along the baseline and targets, it is more difficult for passers to get into any kind of rhythm.  This might be something you want to consider in your rotational order.   If you avoid very similar servers going back-to-back to back, you may find this creates more comfort for the receiving team.

If you have a few high risk servers, you may want to distribute them intentionally so as not to produce too many errors in a row.   By putting lower risk servers in between, you are hopefully less likely to sequentially experience errors, without overtly sending a confusing message.  The rotational order and who serves when should also consider the strength of your rotations. As an example, if you have a weak rotation at the net, you may consider a higher risk server to help you earn points.  If you have a very strong rotation at the net, you might think about a more stable and lower risk server, to help you stay in that rotation as long as possible. This is all food for thought when juggling the pieces of your line-up.  Then of course, you might also consider the match-ups with your opponent, if they can be predicted. The same mentality in reverse would apply. 

This approach also means communicating these roles to each server. Servers should have a good understanding of where they fit in the serving profile and whether they have the green light to try to earn points from the serving line or whether their risk: reward ratio is lower.

RISK-REWARD ANALYSIS

When deciding how much risk is too much risk, there are several questions coaches should ask themselves. We have talked about what each athlete is capable of, both technically and psychologically. What does your team need to be successful, not just against any opponent, but against the best opponents you will face.  If you have an outstanding block-defense system and your team can transition well, then perhaps you don’t need as much risk.  If your team is a strong side-out team, with great pass-to-attack efficiency, then risk may be worth it, because even with errors, you can simply side-out right back which ultimately means you are just trading points.  Remember, you only need to “steal” a few serving points to be successful, as long as you can readily side-out.

So much to consider. 

Just a reminder that if you have a young team, the main keys are consistency and clarity.   If you want aggressive serving, then you must be accepting of errors.  As teams get older and more skilled your delivery plan can become more varied and specific to opponents and rotations.  Just don’t overwhelm or keep changing as this will result in more errors as well.

Now, going back to the Tokyo Olympic scenario, and the USA missing 27 serves in a 3-set match.  Clearly the coach’s philosophy and approach were essentially that the serve is a weapon with which to earn points, and the players were free to go after aces.  This approach has paid dividends to that program over time as they are consistently one of the top ranked teams in the world.

At the highest level there is no question that teams’ ability to side-out is very high when they are in system and that serving teams’ success at defending and transitioning for points or stuff-blocking are greatly increased when opponents are out-of-system.

If you were in Coach Speraw’s situation, would you stick with your ‘go-for-it’ plan?  Would that be the case for all servers and in all rotations?   Would you make any alterations to your risk-reward plan?   How would and how do you deal with serving crises?  Too easy, too many errors, serving the ‘wrong’ receiver or zone?   Think about your philosophy, and your plan.  Are plans meant to be in concrete or can they be adjusted to increase effectiveness?   After all, in the end, every coach wants to ensure their team is serving for success.