Of the two best known, free video players in which you can watch the videos that illustrate this tennis lesson on the underhand sidespin serve, the Windows Media Player (for WMV) has an advantage over the RealPlayer (for RM) in that you are free to replay a video without reloading the clip. These tennis videos take only seconds to download.
watch WMV video (78 KB)
watch RM video (88 KB)
The underhand sidespin serve was fairly popular in the late 1800s and early 1900s. It is much rarer today, but it has played a dramatic role in a couple of modern French Open singles matches. Martina Hingis was severely booed for using it against Steffi Graf in 1999, which seemed unfair, given that Michael Chang had gotten much praise for using it against Ivan Lendl ten years earlier.
As a surprise and a way to pull your opponent off the court or jam her, the underhand sidespin serve can still be effective, even in a world of power hitting that would have been hard to imagine at the turn of the century. Its severe sidespin makes the ball curve visibly in the air, then quite dramatically on the bounce. When well executed and placed near the sideline, it can pull your opponent wide beyond the doubles alley. The risk, of course, is that if your opponent gets to that wide, short, slow ball in time, she can reply either severely crosscourt or down the line, and you have to be ready for either return.
Roughly half of the spin on a typical underhand sidespin serve is backspin. Hitting a pure sidespin serve would be extremely difficult, if not impossible. The backspin helps to accentuate the sideward bounce, because it slows the ball's forward motion, thus increasing the amount of sideward motion per forward motion that constitutes the angle of the bounce.
The underhand sidepsin serve should be used sparingly to prevent your opponent from getting used to it. Some opponents might consider this serve a "trick" and scorn your use of it, but it's a perfectly ethical and legal serve that preserves an element of pure finesse in a serving universe that's dominated by power. The underhand sidespin is as much fun to try to return as it is to hit.
