Why Do Tennis Players Bounce The Ball Before Serving?

Tennis is one of the world’s most popular sports, played by over 100 million people and everything tends to that the sport will grow even bigger in the future. Whether you are an avid tennis fan or someone who randomly turned on the TV during Wimbledon, you have at least once asked yourself this: Why are the players bouncing the ball so many times before serving?

It may be tricky to understand, but there are some logical reasons behind that. That’s what we will go through in this article.

Why do tennis players bounce the ball before serving? Tennis players bounce the ball before serving as a ritual to get focused on what is happening right now. It helps a player to get into the right rhythm and to steady the nerves. Bouncing the ball before serving also gives tennis players time to catch their breath, visualize, and most importantly getting into the right position.

Why Tennis Players Bounces The Ball Before Serving

Ritual/Rhythm: Bouncing the ball before serving is part of a service ritual. It helps tennis players to focus on what is happening right now. Your mind gets calmed down and doing the same ritual over and over again, helps players with their serving consistency. Every high-level player has some sort of serving ritual. Most players are very consistent with the ritual. If you count the bounces, you will notice that many pros have a certain amount of bounces before the first serve and a certain number for second serves. 

Getting Into The Right Position: This is not something that you usually think about, but the bouncing of the ball actually helps you to get into the right position and getting the right momentum before serving. Andy Murray himself said in an interview that this was the main reason why he bounces the ball before serving. It does not only give time to getting into the right body positioning, it also gives time to adjust the grip and catching breath.

Steady The Nerves: During a whole tennis match, there will be pressured moments when you will feel nervous. The ritual of bouncing the ball can steady out the nerves because it calms you down and all your thinking about is you bouncing the ball up and down. It may seem weird, but it does actually work.

Visualization: A big part of every sport at the highest level, is visualization. To imagine in your mind what you are going to do, will be backed by science increase your chances of that happening. Also, visualizing gives you the confidence that you can do your imaginations in the real life. By bouncing the ball before serving, gives you time to not only think, but also imagine how and where you will serve.

Pro Tennis Players Serving Ritual

As i mentioned before, most professional tennis players have their own ritual before serving. In most cases that is bouncing the ball, but there is other stuff that tennis players do prior to serving as well. 

Rafael Nadal: Nadal got one of the most unique and special serving rituals. I would like to put in the word weird also. He bounces the ball before serving like everyone else, but he is one of the players on the ATP Tour that bounces the most (usually 10+ times). Also, the weird thing he does is while he bounces, he fixes his hair, touches his nose, and like he is most known for, he pulls his underwear.

John Isner: A player like John Isner whose whole game surrounds his big serve, needs to have a good serving ritual right? Yes, and his serving ritual is very special and it reminds me of Shapovalov who has a similar serving routine. Isner’s serving ritual starts with him bouncing the ball 1 time behind his legs, and then he bounces a few times with the racquet before he ends the serving ritual with 2 normal bounces using his hand.

Alexander Zverev: Zverev has a pretty common approach to his serving routine. He bounces the ball 6-8 times, while he moves back and forward with his upper body. On second serves, Zverev bounces 1 or 2 times more compared to his first serves.

Novak Djokovic: Djokovic is another player that loves to bounce the ball. He is one of the few that consistently bounces the ball more than 10 times before serving. He actually has what I think is the record of the most bounces before serving in a professional tournament. It happened in the Miami Open 2012, he bounced the ball 24(!) times before serving for match ball against Andy Murray. However, apart from Nadal and Zverev, he is not doing anything special while bouncing the ball.

Does It Really Work?

It definitely does. The 2 players that bounce the ball before serving the most out of all players on tour, are the world No.1 (Novak Djokovic) and the world No.2 (Rafael Nadal). It’s not like the other players don’t bounce the ball, but I mean if the best players in the world are those who bounce the ball most times before serving, then it’s pretty obvious that the ritual of bouncing the ball works.

Frankly, I think it’s only 1 player on the whole ATP Tour that is not bouncing the ball before serving, Feliciano Lopez. He does bounce the ball with the racquet before serving, but he rarely bounces the ball with his hand as everyone else does. If he does bounce the ball with his hand, it’s never more than 1 time.

At the highest level, everyone can serve extremely well, and since the level of the serves is so good, it’s all about the mental side when serving. Being focused is not something you can practice and keep during your whole career. It’s something that you need to be conscious about all the time while on the court, and especially when serving. You often see players making double faults in the most important moments, and it’s not because they haven’t practiced serves enough. It’s because they get nervous and cannot focus on the right things.

Final Thoughts

Many beginner players will see the top players bouncing the ball and performing some sort of ritual. They might give it a try and in the beginning, it will feel like it’s a waste of time. But, after a while, when your ritual comes automatically, you would not even think about not doing your ritual before serving. If you do try to serve without your normal ritual, you will from my experience, serve way worse.

If you don’t have a serving routine, I highly recommend you to get one. But, you should not force it, because it comes naturally the more you play and develop. I don’t think Nadal decided one day that he is going to pull his underwear before serving, it’s just something that came naturally. If bouncing the ball before serving works for all the top-ranked players in the world, it should work for you as well.