There have been a few interesting new serves that have surfaced over the past few months that I wanted to take a look at, and try out.
Zane Navartil’s serve seemed to cause some waves, and has proven to be pretty effective in singles in particular. It’s super heavy, and comes in hot and deep, and is just generally hard to deal with. In this match against Tyson McGuffin, Zane gets a lot of free point and/or weak returns.
Are all of Zane’s serves legal? Some look borderline too high of contact point to me, however if the ref isn’t calling it, then I guess it’s within the rules for that match.
I’m not totally sold on how much added spin “snapping” the ball adds to your serve, but it does seem to be a thing people are playing around with.
I also saw a video on Morgan Evans serve, which is linked below :
This video to be honest caught me by surprise, and I had to watch it a bunch of times to try and figure out what’s going on there. (2nd serve @ around 30 seconds in)
As far as I can tell, what he’s doing is appearing to hit with heavy inside out slice, so his opponent is expecting it to trail off further out the court (servers right, returners left), when in fact he’s putting the opposite spin on his toss, so the ball in fact goes straight or even slightly the opposite way.
It is very much like a table tennis serve (which is admittedly way outside my realm of expertise!), and he is trying to fool his opponent and disguise what spin he’s using.
Not sure what’s going to happen with these serves within the sport, but it is increasingly apparent that they are going to have a big impact in high level pickleball. I don’t yet have an opinion on what or how I feel about it, but I know I’d be pissed if someone was getting a bunch of free/cheap points against me with it!
My advice to people – probably gotta fight fire with fire….learn to spin!