For many years, the service could have been considered as Martina's biggest weakness, mainly due to a suboptimal form of the pronation with the elbow staying rather too low and the racket traveling rather too much on the horizontal plane after the impact. Over the course of the years, Martina was able to improve it a bit and her pronation did look much better later in her career. With the elbow.....
Photos below show Casper's service during 2015 Orange Bowl. Even thought that his service was not that dominant back then, the most important basic characteristics of the Service 3.0 were already there at that time and provided a solid base for further development/improvement. The most important among them is the proper understanding of the "follow through 1" with a well-executed (well-pronounced) targeted pronation.
This former top 10 player in both singles and doubles as well as twice Davis Cup Champion with the team of the Czech Republic belongs to the best servers on the Tour from the technical point of view. Despite his just average body size of 185cm (6'1''), he has a quite high career ace probability of 51% per game played.
Already in the late 90's, Mirjana belonged to the most dominant serving female players on the WTA Tour as she was one of the first of them who really understood the efficient use of the pronation. On the photos from 1998 shown below is well visible how fast she was able to pronate with the integration of the body energy already in the age of 16 years
As a tall player of 198 cm (6'6''), Delpo has quite some power potential, which he is using in all of his strokes. His body parameters and solid technique make also his service to a dangerous weapon, despite partly missing one distinct element common to the very best servers of the history. His career service statistics (until the end of 2016) are quite impressive - in the total of 5563 service games - 3272 aces (against 1100 double faults), 64% of the 1st services in and 74% winning percentage on the 1st service points.
Here the distinction between her typical first service (usually more or less direct with just a slight topspin) and her famous kick service (heavy topspin with some sidespin used mostly as a second service) are quite visible. In both varieties, Samantha spends almost the entire stroke energy on the dominant (right, in her case as a right-handed player) side. The "follow through 1" (= the active part of the follow through) of the kick/topspin serve then goes, besides other differences to the first service, much more to the right.
Ivo Karlovic (*1979 / CRO) belongs to the most dominant servers/servicemen in the history of tennis and his more than 11,500 aces served throughout his professional career (as of December 2016) on the tour are a record hardly to be matched. At the height of 211 cm (6’11”) and weight of 104 kg (230 lb), Ivo...
Ying-Ying Duan (*89 / CHN) can be at her age of 27 years hardly considered as a young tennis prodigy, but this relatively new entrant into the WTA top 100 could eventually become a factor in the women's tennis. At her height of 186cm (6'1''), the service can be considered as her biggest weapon. Her service surely has already quite some potential, but certain improvements could bring even better serving efficiency and higher margin along.
From the point of the technique, Karolina has some excellent aspects of the Service 3.0 going most probably back to her early technical development stage in her junior years and also one little weakness leading to a lower margin at decisive (tense) moments like during her recent US.Open finals. Some of the main elements can be seen below..
One of the most misleading tennis instructions is the imperative suggestion to lead the racket after the impact across to the non-dominant leg (left with the right-handed player) in the follow through of the service motion....
