The BEST Pickleball Serving Tips On The Internet... 

I’ve been playing 3 months and thanks to your videos like this, I go on 5 to 6 point serve runs. Appreciate all you do!

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Great tips, easy to understand and well demonstrated. Would like to see video on how to return serves, especially with side spin. thanks!

Another great tip video Conner👌... TheAngryPickleball

Thanks for all your videos, I've learned a lot!

Great content: clear explanations, demonstrations. All the pieces fit together. Will work this tomorrow morning!

Hi Connor. I'm from Australia and was travelling earlier this month in LA and I actually played social pickleball on three occasions at your Tennis Club. Your mom was so friendly as were the players. I'll now follow your channel mate 🙌

Nice presentation upgrades as well as solid content. Nice court too.

Got inspired by the tips from this video and went out to practice serving by myself. Consistently managed to land hard serves with top spin in the back 1/3rd. Thank you!

This was a really good video on the serve and how aggressive to be. Thanks. I would mention increasing you margin for error in windy conditions.

Fantastic lesson! THANKS!

Great informative video Connor!

I struggle with depth and hadn't thought about the height aspect, love that tip will try it tomorrow!

Love you vids bro! 💕👍

One thing I’ve learned that works on normal Rec people is doing a mix of serves.. I might do two normals serves, then do a couple of lob serves, then sneak in a fast serve. This will throw off the person just slightly where their return will be sloppy leaving you with a good 3rd shot

Great stuff! One thing I don't see talked about much is making sure you're hitting the ball below the waist

As always great info, can’t wait to try it out

Nice

What is your opinion on a slow, high topspin lob drop serve that bounces like a kick serve approximately at/near the baseline?

what are the ratings and how do I figure out what I am?

A better way to explain shoulder rotation in my experience is with the off hand and not to describe it as a horizontal rotation but as a vertical rotation of the shoulders as in you get lower and your chest is closer to parallel to the ground when creating the kinetic chain. I describe the off hand as making a motion upwards with the pinky towards the sky. This gives people are more intuitive understanding of the movement which is admittedly complex.

what's the paddle u r using in this video?

Well done and very helpful ! If you slowed down just a tad in speaking we wouldn’t have to pause and remind so much lol. You’re the man though . So helpful brother

Add a step forward to your serve and it will increase power a lot

Love your videos! Could someone pull those weeds on the fence line so it’s not so distracting to ocd ppl like me?! Lol 😂. Really learning a lot from you Connor! Thank you!

The other problem with going deep is that rec players tend to call anything close to or on the paint out. I have a pretty consistent deep serve but I have to lighten up. Some day they’ll be a cheap laser system for line calls.

Wait is this in Torrance?

Connor, when will you have another Pickleball net give away? The church I go to needs a Pickleball net for the kids. Hopefully, I could win one or get a good deal on a net to donate? Any ideas? 😊 thanks for all you do!!! God Bless ❤

Is it legal to toss the ball when serving? I thought the new rules for 2023 state that no force may be added to the ball when released from the hand?

Is it legal to spin a serve right to left or left to right per the 2023 rule change?

What paddle are you playing with?

Clever guy, just practice what he says and you will improve.

It looks like a portion of the paddle head is above your wrist at the point of contact. I believe this is a fault according to PPA rules. This is how it looks at the beginning of this video. At this point I will continue watching the video. Just thought I'd point out that at the beginning of the video, it appears to be more of a side arm than an upward arc. Ron

I noticed you used 2 different paddles in this video; do I win a prize?

IT APPEARS THAT YOU ARE NOT USING CONTINENTAL GRIP.. DO YOU CHANGE GRIP FOR SERVE?

The obvious thing about you showing the height the ball should fly over the nets is it is exactly at your shoulder height! Therefore when serving, aim for the shoulder height of a person standing at the net.

I go for 100% consistent serves every game. As not doing that equals 'free points' to opposition, and you have let both your partner and yourself down with 'basic shots'. Your serves is '100%' in your control, if you are not getting 100% then keep drilling until you do. Same with hitting the net. Make the NET your no. 1 enemy. When i drill a practice skinny singles game, we play rally scores and anytime either of us hit the net or hit an out ball / wrong court during serves, our individual score go back to zero. This punish us for not getting the basics right. Only try 'different strategy serves when 'you are ahead by 3-4points'.

I thought the paddle has to be below the wrist joint at the moment of contact. This is not what you seem to be instructing.

This is great about how to add power, BUT it is an illegal serve. The top of the paddle is above his wrist.

i guess the don't care about the paddle being below the wrist like they did years ago

Who is this player? Did he introduce himself and I missed it?

First of all, coming from a squash background, the first thing I drilled in PB was an exaggerated torso rotation, in the horizontal plane rather than the vertical plane, with a semi-western overbite. I did this outdoors on a doubles tennis court until I could reliably hit from one tennis corner to the far opposite tennis corner with a fairly low, hard shot. You can't do that without getting your kinetic chain in good order, unless you've got Tom Brady pipes (and when did he ever throw a football with a bad kinetic chain?) Then I reduced my power to about 1/3 of that level on the PB court. The mostly vertical plane we use in pickleball, when used on a squash court, is only good for scraping balls off the floor. I guess you could describe my prototype serve as a monster swing volley uncorked just below the hip. What this video should have explained, but didn't, is that a great deal of your inconsistency is in the time domain. Think about your paddle face. There's a normal vector, which is perpendicular to both the length and width of your paddle face. This is intrinsic to the face of the paddle, not the path of paddle motion. If you photograph yourself in a mirror, dead on, that's the normal vector. With a standard stroke, the face of the paddle is mostly moving straight toward the ball. The speed of that motion imparts velocity. If the paddle motion is not entirely straight, it will also impart spin. But the _direction_ of the ball is mostly imparted from the paddle face normal vector. With what they call a "push" stroke, the paddle face normal vector has constant orientation. It doesn't much matter _when_ you hit the ball, it will leave your paddle in the same direction. At the other extreme is a whip with the wrist, where you induce a very high rotational rate in the paddle face immediately prior to ball contact. This is more like a miniature baseball swing. In baseball, if you're early to the ball, you hit it down the 3rd base line. If you're late to the ball, you hit it down the 1st base line. This has to do with whether you strike the ball before or after the bat has rotated through the central point in the swing where the bat's normal vector points at the pitcher's mound. A baseball swing is mostly in the horizontal plane, so timing errors on a whip contact spray the ball left and right. The serve demonstrated here is mostly in the vertical plane. Whip on contact will mostly produce errors in lift trajectory, which translates to serves landing short or long. Exaggerated whip is another way to produce spin, especially top spin. You contact the ball at the beginning of the whip at a sharp angle, so that the ball starts to roll across your paddle face, but before it rolls all the way off your paddle face, the normal vector rotates a large fraction of 180° so that it leaves the paddle at the opposite sharp angle. In between, you are kind of "cradling" the ball, but not as much as soft strings on a tennis racquet. You can cradle the ball for longer down the length of the paddle, rather than across the width of the paddle (and it's a far more natural motion). Whip is tricky because the timing has to be dialed in. Whip is useful, because it's hard for the opponent to read small changes in your technique, so the track of the ball is unpredictable. Except on the serve, it's really hard to get the timing dialed in during game play. The ball is spinning in many different ways, subject to gusts of wind, and the bounce can also be variable. It's not even all that easy to get whip dialed in on the serve, where you control all the variables yourself. So my serve at the beginning of my rec sessions always starts with a technique I might describe as a dink on steroids: just an easy stroke lifting the ball from underneath, and nice intermediate arc into the back 1/3 of the court. Once that become second nature during game play, I begin to relax my wrist. If my consistency stays high, then I start to lead the motion with the butt of my paddle, with the first point of contact increasingly oblique (very high risk of driving the ball straight into the net if not rehearsed). Sometimes I go straight over top of the ball, other times it's a bit more side-arm. (Straight over top only works with a bounce serve.) I'm still experimenting with address. Many people who don't use the bounce serve struggle with consistency because they don't get their drop hand out of the way of the paddle with the same motion each time. If you even vaguely suspect you are going to slam your drop hand with your paddle, the instinctive tendency is to "break" your wrist to delay contact. This will spray the ball into the bleachers, to one side or the other. If you are using a standard swing path from one hip to the opposite ear, you are 80% vertical and 20% horizontal, about five to eleven on the peacock's tail clock face for a right-hander. On my "dink" serve, the paddle face normal vector is almost entirely constant throughout the motion. A little bit of the motion comes from the hips (mostly to maintain balance), and the bulk of the motion comes from rotation of the shoulder. Very little comes from the elbow or wrist. Fewer moving parts ... more consistency. When I'm waling on the ball 100% the rotation starts at the feet and comes through the whole body (knees, hips, waist, shoulders) like a golf swing. This has to be symphonic and automatic, or it's a total mess. This devolves onto the part of your brain called spindle fibers, which control complex automatic movement patterns (think landing a jump in figure skating). Your spindle fibers are most active in the last two-hour block of eight hours in bed in solid slumber. Practice. Sleep. Practice. Sleep. That's how you make a movement pattern with a dozen separate elements coordinated and symphonic. That's one route to consistency. The other route to consistency is to adopt a basic serve with far fewer moving parts. You don't even necessarily want pure consistency. A smattering of controlled inconsistency is quite effective. A little longer, a little shorter, a little harder, a little softer, a little bit more spin, a little bit less spin, but always in bounds. You achieve this with a highly practiced motion around a central component with low tolerance for error, or you could say high sensitivity. A highly exaggerated whip through the wrist at the last second qualifies as such a beast. Mostly I observe the situation on court. If my opponent is returning to my partner, and my partner is struggling to make a good 3rd shot, then I amp up my serve. Maybe depth alone is enough. Or maybe the opponent is a creature of habit, so want enough variety to prevent the opponent from becoming totally dialed in. In computer science there's this thing called explore/exploit. Later on in a match, there's often a point in time where your opponent decides she's got your patterns figured out, and sets her mind to exploit those weaknesses. That's a great time to switch from the muffin serve (aka the dink serve with but two moving parts) to something with a lot more variety and bite. Suddenly their perfectly designed and placed kill shot is hitting the white tape, and they don't immediately know why. With a sufficiently good opponent, pretty much nothing you do with the serve will alter the quality of the service return. Then you just want the same, simple, heavy top spin that lands quite deep. These are notes from someone with more aptitude for physics than phys-ed, who plays in a rec league where maybe a dozen other players have many elements of their game at the 4.0+ level. I don't think anyone has the whole package yet, but some are pretty close. A few guys have 50% of the package refined to a 4.5 level, but still with major holes at the 4.0 level.

isn't holding the paddle at that angle on a serve illegal? "The head of the paddle must not be above the highest part of the wrist at contact."

Get the feeling folks just gotta stick to banana serves. Top spin serves validity seems to be questionable prolly due to skill issue

Why is serving so important when the ball has to bounce on each side.

This game discriminates against short people 😁

Interesting - but you need to emphasize that your paddle head has to be below the wrist at contact. So many people are so focused on power that they are coming thru too flat. That's one of the reasons that the first proposed rule change for 2024 is to make the drop serve the Only serve.

If you're having a problem, you probably got 1 of 3 wrong.

Where is his feet at ?

Who knew Michael J. Fox plays pickleball?

this guy doesn’t know beans about the kinetic chain or really anything else. he needs to read some books