How To Hold The Ball For The Serve Toss

Holding the ball correctly for the serve toss is very important since you need to toss the ball very accurately for a good tennis serve.

An accurate ball toss depends also on how you execute the whole tossing motion with the whole arm, but many times the toss problems originate in the way the player holds the ball.

This article will show you exactly how you need to hold the ball, which drills you can use to improve your tossing motion and how to integrate the toss into your whole tennis service motion.

How To Hold The Ball

The ball should rest in the little valley between the fingers and the palm.

Find that position first in your hand and then gently hold the ball with your thumb.

One of the most common mistakes players make is to hold the ball with the tips of the fingers.

When you do that, you will likely make a small movement with your wrist or with your fingers as you are executing the toss. This movement will make the ball fly in a slightly different trajectory every time, making serving very difficult.

The goal is to “calm down” the wrist joint and the fingers so that they don’t disturb the tossing motion.

Therefore, you should place the ball in the middle part of your hand where it rests by itself with almost no need to hold it except to “steady” it with the thumb.

Your fingers then extend out, and you can then place the racket on them.

This also helps you coordinate both arms in the whole service motion, which will help you execute the serve better.

As you start executing the toss, let go of the ball with the thumb and keep extending the arm upwards in a straight line.

The fingers are not doing anything in that stage, and the wrist simply tries to keep the hand pointing upwards to the sky so that the ball is lifted and not thrown.

I explained that process in more detail in the Keep Lifting article.

2 Drills To Steady The Hand

The main reason for an inaccurate toss is slight movement of the hand/wrist as the player is releasing the ball.

Therefore, we coaches look for tennis drills that help quiet the hand.

Drill #1 – Toss The Ball With The Fist

Form a fist and place the ball on top of it. Now toss the ball like that.

As with most drills, this one is based on exaggerating a certain principle. When you form a fist, you prevent the hand from flicking the ball backwards, which often happens.

You should also realize that, without any movement from the hand, you have to use the shoulder muscle, which is the right muscle for the serve toss.

So, through this drill, we try to calm down the hand and stimulate the right muscles for the toss.

Drill #2 – Toss While Holding Two Balls

This is a very simple drill, but it can be quite effective.

Your goal is toss the “front” ball while holding two balls.

This again helps you calm down the hand so that it doesn’t make any sudden and erratic movements while tossing.

Toss like that for a minute or two. Then attempt a regular toss with one ball and see if you can keep a steady hand throughout the toss.

Integrating The Toss Into The Service Motion

Since we’re on the topic of the tennis serve toss, I’d like to share with you one more idea relevant to the toss.

And that’s the idea of integrating the toss into the service motion.

When the toss is not integrated, it’s isolated. An isolated toss means that you first attempt to toss the ball accurately and only then begin the wind up/backswing of the serve.

You feel that you can toss more accurately if you don’t move any other body parts except the tossing arm.

The problem with this approach is that the movement is not natural and is therefore stiff. It actually causes more problems than it solves.

Natural body movements are always coordinated, in sync and smooth.

It is only through a smooth tossing motion that you can achieve very good accuracy of your tosses and, therefore, of your serves.

The Foundation Of The Toss Happens Naturally

Put the racket away and take a tennis ball.

Pretend you’re going to throw it at an upwards angle of around 45 degrees.

Just coil and prepare for a throw.

What happened with your non-dominant arm? Did it do up?

If it did, you have a good throwing motion and you should use that natural and unconscious lift of the non-dominant arm as the foundation of your toss.

If your non-dominant arm did not go up and just stayed hanging down, then you don’t have a good throwing motion and you need to work on it before you can expect to make good serves in tennis.

Now take the racket and again pretend you want to throw it up towards the sky at around a 45-degree angle.

Note how the non-dominant arm automatically comes up.

Try to feel with which body parts and muscles you create that upward move of the arm.

Now hold a tennis ball and just release it as the arm comes up during the simulated upward racket throw.

You can see that the ball flies upwards. It’s not yet accurate, but the point of these progressions is that you realize and feel where the toss comes from.

It’s not an isolated move but part of the whole service “wind up.”

Now use that whole preparation movement to initiate the toss but start refining it with a more vertical arm movement and more clear intention of where you want to place the ball in an imaginary box above you.

So, hopefully this demonstrates how you can learn over time to integrate the toss into your service motion instead of using an isolated tossing motion of the arm.

With some practice over time, you will see that the toss just happens and you don’t have to think about it.

The initial toss movement happens through the whole body movement (coiling and tilting), and then you progress to the lifting idea where you place the ball more accurately with a vertical arm movement.