How do you return a tennis serve that has spin?

Answer 1

You can return serves either cross court, down the line, short, or deep to the baseline. The type of return you hit should take into account the spin on the serve. Serves with topspin will bounce high. Serves that are flat tend to be low and will go into your body. Serves with slice will kick out at extreme angles or bounce straight up and die quickly.

To return a topspin serve you will need to be ready to hit a ball that will kick up high into the air after it bounces on the ground. Step in and return the shot early, right after it bounces off the ground. This way you'll eliminate the effects of their topspin.

To return a flat shot you can hit it with any spin. The ball will be low, so bend your knees and make sure to follow through.

Returning a slice serve can be tricky. It is critical that your feet are ready to move in any direction in a split second. Slice shots can sometimes bounce in funny angles or barely bounce off the ground. Try hitting a topspin return. Topspin allows you extra time to get back to ready position.

So far we have only considered what a spinning ball will do once it touches the ground.

However, balls with a significant amount of spin will be doing things through the air even before they reach the ground. This is due to the infamous 'magnus effect'. I won't go into the mechanics here.

For instance, with servers like John Newcombe, or modern servers who step up to the serve and come around the ball, the ball will carry a great amount of sidespin that will swing through the air away from a right-handed player receiving a right-hander's serve into his deuce court if served wide to the receiver's forehand side. If this style is used when serving down the 'T', or to the receiver's backhand side, it will tend to cut back into the receiver's body.

Answer 2

Any shot can produce spin. And there are different types of spin too like topspin and underspin.

Rarely do players hit the ball flat (that is, with little or no spin). Most shots are hit either with topspin or with slice (also called underspin or, on the serve, sidespin).

The most common type of spin in tennis is topspin. If you saw a topspin shot in slow motion, it would look like the seams of the ball were rolling in the direction of the shot. To picture it another way, let's say you're standing to the right of a player who's just hit a topspin shot. If you could see the ball in slow-motion, you would see it rolling clockwise, like the wheel of a car moving forward.

In modern tennis, topspin is king. It lets you clear the net by a larger margin on your shots, and you can hit the ball harder. That rolling forward spin actually works as a complement to gravity, pulling the ball down. And when the ball hits the court, topspin makes the ball bounce faster and higher than it otherwise would.

When you hit a topspin groundstroke, your racquet face should usually be vertical at the point of impact. Sometimes, on a very low ball, you have to open the racquet face; that is, you have to point the strings slightly skyward. But on most topspin shots, you keep the racquet face straight up and down; the low-to-high motion of the racquet will generate enough upward momentum to put topspin on the shot and to let it clear the net. Sometimes you even close the racquet face a little; in other words, the strings are angled slightly towards the ground. For example, when you hit a half-volley (a groundstroke struck right after the ball bounces), you often have to close the racquet face a little so your shot doesn't go long.

By contrast to topspin, a slice groundstroke is spinning in the opposite direction; the ball is spinning back towards you. The effect, not surprisingly, is the opposite of topspin. Underspin tends to keep the shot in the air; the ball doesn't dive for the court the way a topspun ball does. Also, as a slice shot moves through the air, it slows down; after all, the ball may be moving forward, but it's spinning backwards. When a slice groundstroke hits the court, it bounces lower and slower than a flat or topspin shot. For this reason, players use slice to make their drop shots more effective; slice makes the shot bounce almost straight up, or even back towards the net if the spin is great enough.

When you hit a slice groundstroke, the racquet actually goes on a forward path from high to low. What allows the ball to still clear the net, in spite of that downward motion of the stroke, is the fact that the racquet face is open -- in other words, the racquet face is angled towards the sky. How much you angle the face depends on what you're trying to do with the shot. If you're trying to hit a groundstroke deep into your opponent's court, the racquet face usually won't be as open as when you're trying to hit a drop shot. Of course, the forward momentum of the racquet also affects how far the shot goes.

The slice forehand is rarely seen in tennis, except on drop shots. The slice backhand, however, is the bread-and-butter of most amateurs and some pros. In the past, there were great players who only hit their backhand with slice, Ken Rosewall being the most famous of that breed. (Pam Shriver and John Newcombe were also slice-only on the backhand wing.) Today, however, virtually all pros hit both slice and topspin backhands. Usually, players with two-handed topspin backhands hit a one-handed slice.

The word "slice" has a different meaning when applied to the serve. A slice serve is hit with sidespin, not underspin. On a slice serve, the racquet face brushes sideways across the back of the ball. That sideways spin means that the ball changes course in flight; a right-hander's slice serve will break to the server's left, both in the air and off the bounce. So if I'm serving to the deuce court (the service box across the net on my left), and I hit a slice serve to the outer corner of that service box, the spin will pull my serve towards the left fence; the result, of course, is that my opponent will have to move to his right in order to hit the return. Back in the '40s, Jack Kramer was notorious for hitting serves with so much slice that, in the deuce court, his opponent would nearly have to run into the stands to get the ball back. In the '70s and '80s, John McEnroe employed a devastating slice serve, with a difference; since McEnroe was left-handed, his slice serve broke the other way, towards a righty's backhand. As a result, McEnroe could pull opponents off the court when serving to the ad court (the service box across the net on your right when you're the server). The reason that lefties are often thought to have an advantage in tennis is because their slice serve naturally breaks to a right-hander's backhand, and the majority of tennis players, of course, are right-handed. Also, a disproportionate number of big points in tennis start with a serve to the ad court.

Answer 3

Nope