Some New Drills (to me, anyway)

This is a group of a couple "drills" I put together in a progression to show the importance of good serves and returns as well as being aggressive getting to the net.

Part One: Spread out (12 players - four to each court) and serve from one half of the court.  So we have four guys on one baseline serving to an empty court.  We scored our serves as follows:

Out - 0 Points
In, second bounce inside the court - 1Point
In, second bounce outside the court - 2 Points
In, second bounce hitting the fence/wall - 3 points

First person to reach 18 points (or whatever you decide) wins.  It was a fun drill.  The guys hustled to get to the baseline, but they obviously had to slow down to focus when it actually came to serving.  I feel like it was a good mental challenge on top of good serving practice.  Some guys went for the slow and steady approach of dinking serves in and consistently getting one point. Those guys landed in the middle of the lineup (see below.)  The guys with the power serves and some consistency were all at the top.  And, well, we know who was at the bottom.

Part Two: I had the players line up in order of the points in the serving drill.  I had the 1st and 4th person be partners and play against the 2nd and 3rd, 5th and 8th play against 6th and 7th, etc..

We did tiebreakers, but with some twists.  (Anytime I try a new drill, there is almost always things I don't think of until we put it to action.  This was no exception, so we really made some adjustments as we went along.)  The main twist was that your winners only count if you hit it from inside the service line.  This was to encourage players to get up to the net, as I discussed in a previous post.  Double faults, aces, and errors all counted as points; but if there was a winner or forced error it only counted if the person who hit it was inside the service box.  The winning team would move up a court, losing team would move down.

I was met with some success in this drill.  It definitely forced my baseline backboard type players to get up to the net.  It also, definitely frustrated some of my better singles players who aren't too keen on not ripping the ball as hard as they can from the baseline.  I do plan to return to this drill - or some variation of it - someday, with a little bit better handle on the rules.

The second main twist was taking away the second serve (or first serve, depending on how you want to look at it) which was kind of fun.  They still had to get to the net, but that takes on a little bit different of a look when you only have one serve.  The intent was to show players who are going for 120mph first serve at 20% and 20mph second serve at notmuchbetter% that a solid, consistent serve is better than a sporadic great serve.

After a couple rounds of each variation we played a normal tiebreaker, mostly for the sake of my players' sanity.