Ask most junior players where they aim their serve and you’ll hear the same two answers: out wide or down the T. Both are good. Both are also what the returner is expecting. The serve almost nobody practices — and the one that quietly wins the most free points at the junior level — is the serve hit straight at the returner’s body.
I’m Michael Boothman, and in thirty years of coaching here in Sarasota I’ve watched more matches turn on the body serve than on any highlight-reel ace. It isn’t flashy. It’s just hard to return, because the ball takes away the one thing a returner needs most: room to swing. This post walks through why the body serve works, and a live-ball drill I run with juniors to build it into a real weapon.
Why the body serve is so hard to return
A returner sets up to hit one of two swings — a forehand or a backhand — and their footwork is built around getting the racquet out to the side of the body where the strike zone lives. A wide serve gives them a forehand or backhand with full extension. A serve up the T does the same on the other side. But a ball driven at the hip, the belt buckle, or the front shoulder jams that whole system. The returner has to decide, in a fraction of a second, whether to open up for a forehand or fend it off with a backhand, and then physically move out of the way of the ball to make space. Most juniors freeze, get cramped, and float a weak reply right back into the middle of the court.
There’s a reason the pros lean on it. The USTA’s own serve guidance lists placement — not raw speed — as the trait that separates effective servers, and points specifically to varying targets, including into the returner’s body, as a way to keep them off balance. If you want to read their breakdown of serve fundamentals, the USTA player development resources are a solid starting point. Speed impresses parents. Placement wins games.
This is an accuracy problem, not a power problem
Here’s where one of our Six Pillars comes in: Accuracy Inside Representative Conditions. The idea is that placement has to be built inside live, game-like conditions — not off a calm basket feed with nobody standing across the net. A junior who can pepper a cone at the hip during a warm-up but sprays the same serve the moment a live returner is standing there hasn’t actually learned the skill. They’ve learned to hit a cone.
So we don’t practice the body serve by aiming at a spot on an empty court. We practice it with a live human returner, points on the line, and a simple number to hit. The target for us is the 85/100 Rule applied to the serve: we want the player making a high percentage of body serves land in while genuinely crowding the returner, under conditions that look like a match. If it only works when nobody’s returning, it isn’t a serve — it’s a party trick.
The drill: Crowd the Returner
Here’s the live-ball drill I use. It takes two players and about fifteen minutes.
Setup. One server, one returner, playing out real points but with a constraint. The server’s job on every first serve is to hit the returner’s body — specifically, the space between the returner’s hip and their front shoulder on the forehand side. No wide serves, no T serves. Body only.
Scoring. Play games to seven. The server earns a bonus point any time the body serve forces a weak or netted return — meaning the returner couldn’t take a full swing. The returner earns a point if they successfully step around the ball and drive a clean return. This matters: the returner is genuinely trying to beat the serve, which is what makes the conditions representative. A returner who’s allowed to stand there like a practice dummy teaches the server nothing.
Progression. Once the server can consistently jam the forehand hip, switch the target to the backhand hip. Then let the server choose — body-forehand or body-backhand — so they’re reading the returner’s stance and picking the more crowded target in real time. That decision-making, made live, is the whole point.
Reps that matter. I’d rather a junior hit 20 body serves against a live returner than 80 against a fence. The live returner supplies the pressure, the movement, and the honest feedback — did the serve actually crowd them, or did they step around it easily? That feedback loop is what turns a target into a skill.
What to watch for as a coach or parent
A few things I coach during this drill:
The toss usually needs to move. Many juniors toss the ball out to the side for their wide serve; the body serve often wants a toss a touch more in front and slightly less out to the side, so the ball drives forward into the returner rather than curving away. Small change, big difference.
Don’t let “at the body” become “down the middle and short.” A soft serve that lands in the middle of the box isn’t a body serve — it’s a sitter. The ball has to arrive at the returner, deep enough that they can’t just step back and tee off. If the returner is comfortable, the target was wrong.
And keep the intent honest. The body serve isn’t about hitting someone. It’s about taking away their space. When a junior understands they’re competing for room — theirs to keep, the returner’s to lose — the serve gets sharper fast.
Where it fits
The body serve isn’t a replacement for the wide serve or the T. It’s the third option that makes the other two more dangerous, because now the returner has to respect the whole box instead of leaning to one side. Juniors who add it typically start winning a handful of cheap first-serve points every set — points that used to be 50/50 rallies.
If you want to see how a drill like this fits into the way we build players over a season, our coaching page lays out the approach. And if your junior is heading into the fall tournament season, this is exactly the kind of low-cost, high-return skill worth grooving now, while the matches still have room to experiment.
Build it live. Keep score. Let the returner fight back. That’s how a target becomes a weapon.
See you on the court!
Coach Michael