5 Easy Tips For A Powerful Pickleball Serve

If you’re like most players, you’re constantly looking for an edge over your opponents on the courts. One way to gain an advantage is to develop a really powerful pickleball serve. But, power isn’t the only name of the game. 

Today, we’re sharing five easy tips for a powerful pickleball serve that will also improve your consistency and just overall give you a better serve to help you win more matches.

Let’s go!

Tip #1 - Serve and rotate those hips and shoulders

Many players go out to their serve and only use their arms and muscles to serve. They aren’t engaging their lower half or using their legs to generate more power. While just using your arm is an easy and consistent serving technique, it will not help you put much oomph on the ball. Also, this technique can hurt your chances when you want to get into more advanced serves. 

Instead of just using your arms, try starting the serve with your weight on the back leg and transferring your weight from your back foot to your front foot. This is a key to getting more power and engaging your lower half during your serve. With this motion, your hips will rotate, and your chest will open up, giving you a better swinging motion and more opportunity to put maximum power on your serve. Now, you’re in a great position to drive the ball and even put a spin on it if you want. 

Tip #2 - Serve with a closed or semi-open stance to get full rotation and power

Similar to the first mistake we discussed, a common sight is players standing in an open stance when they serve the ball. An open stance is when your legs and your chest are parallel with the baseline, and your body is “open” to the net. Instead, it’s a better position to stand in a closed stance. A closed stance means that your left and right feet are behind each other, and your chest is facing the out-of-bounds line. In the middle is the semi-open stance, which is when your chest is open between the net and out of bounds. 

You don’t want an open stance because you want to allow your body to rotate through the ball when you serve. Yes, some pros use an open stance and do really well with it, but for most players, it’s a mistake to start out that way. 

The best way to visualize this might be to think of a golfer or baseball player. When they are about to swing, they are in a closed or semi-closed stance, and their chests aren’t facing the fairway or the pitcher.

Tip #3 - Swing with a relaxed motion, starting with a loose and relaxed grip

Three things that make a serve really good are pace, topspin, and depth. When you shorten your swing and tense up your motion with your arm, you are decreasing the likelihood of hitting all three of those key areas. When serving, you should have a full, relaxed swing throughout your entire serving motion. The mistake in this tip is that players stop the paddle abruptly after making contact with the ball, creating almost a whip motion instead of a full follow-through. Or if the player does take the paddle through the swing, their arms are too tense. 

Instead, a great way to generate power is actually to relax your grip on the paddle. On a scale of one to ten, where ten is a death grip, you want your grip pressure to be around three or four. Relaxing our grip relaxes our arms and shoulders and allows us to swing through the ball. It may sound counter-intuitive, but a relaxed grip actually helps you swing the paddle faster, and a faster paddle means a more powerful swing.

If your arm feels like a noodle, you’re closer to performing a stronger serve!

Tip #4 - Start with a small to medium backswing for a more efficient serve

As mentioned, a faster swing speed leads to a stronger serve. But that doesn’t mean you need a massive backswing. In fact, a big backswing will more likely hurt you because it prevents you from hitting the sweet spot on the paddle more often. It’s easier to generate power and hit the good part of the paddle with a small to medium backswing instead. 

Where is small to medium? Picture starting the paddle from your knee or your hip. Your follow-through should come up to your opposite shoulder. 

Tip #5 - Release the ball from waist level to ensure that you have a consistent contact point

The final tip deals with how you drop or release the ball before you hit it with your paddle. Since the ball begins in one hand and your paddle is in another, developing a good drop is crucial. The main goal of your drop is to put the ball somewhere within the ideal contact point. And the ideal contact point is right around your front knee and out in front of your body. 

If you make your initial contact behind your knee or too out in front of your body, you’re losing some of the momentum you’ve built by being in a great starting position and transferring your weight from back to front.  

Players make two mistakes: they toss the ball up before hitting it, or they hit the ball immediately as it drops out of their hand. These mistakes make it challenging to time your drops with these motions. Instead, players should drop the ball from around their waist level and in front of the baseline. This allows you time to bring your paddle through right around knee level for that initial contact. It also ensures that the ball will be out in front, where we’ll get the most power in our serve. This serve takes practice, but it allows you to be consistent and generate a lot of power in your serve.

Conclusion

What’s great about practicing your serve is that all you need is a bucket of balls to do it. Most clubs will rent out ball buckets, and you can really start to hone in on getting your motion down and developing power that will help you win more pickleball matches.

To learn more and see examples, check out the Briones Pickleball YouTube Channel.