Second-serve nerves: mind or technique?

A child's shoulders tighten before the first serve has even been struck — it is the second serve they are already worried about. The hesitation was never there in practice, and on the points that matter the ball finds the net. Two double faults, and the game is gone.

Before anyone starts picking apart the swing, it helps to find out what is actually going wrong.

A simple self-check

There is a simple test to run with the child on the practice court.

1. Fifty second serves with nobody watching and no score. Count the faults.
2. Fifty second serves with a parent or a teammate watching and calling the score out loud. Count the faults again.

Neither set should be hit tired. Fatigue mixed in changes what the numbers mean.

Without knowing the ordinary spread, there is no telling a double fault that is choking from a double fault that is just the serve's ordinary miss rate. That is what the first count is for. If the two numbers come out close, the problem is technical, and it is something to work on with the coach. If the second set is much worse, the motion isn't the problem: being watched is what tightens the body, and piling on more serve practice will not fix it.

Why a serve that works in practice comes apart in a match

A serve learned in lessons is a motion the body runs on its own. Pressure breaks that. A nervous child starts watching the toss, then the wrist, then the angle of the elbow, one piece at a time. A drop in performance that goes beyond the ordinary spread is what gets called choking1Choking under pressure — Adwoah Hammond and Christopher Mesagno put the question to 23 researchers who work on the subject, over four rounds of surveys and interviews. The definition 91% of them agreed on: a drop in performance beyond the individual's ordinary variability, in a situation that feels important, despite the individual clearly wanting to perform well — and often with anxiety alongside it [1]..

So why is it the well-learned movement that fails? Rich Masters split people learning golf putting into two groups: one picked up the rules of the stroke consciously, well enough to say them out loud, and the other was tied up with a second task while they practised and never got the chance. In a test that put an audience and prize money on it together, the group that could recite the rules was the one that fell apart [2].

Sian Beilock and her colleagues used golf putting and soccer dribbling to change where the attention went. Skilled players got worse when they were asked to attend to the detail of their own movement. Beginners, whose motion was not yet grooved, got better — and so did the skilled players when they dribbled with their weaker left foot [3].

These were putts and dribbles rather than serves, but that the same instruction helps one player and harms another is worth thinking about on court. "Watch your elbow" is the cue that worked while a child was still learning the serve, and once the motion is grooved the same cue can take that serve apart in a match.

Nor does the opposite tack help. "Don't double fault." "Careful, don't put it in the net." Recep Görgülü told 32 skilled tennis players not to serve to one particular spot. Under high anxiety, the number of serves that went to exactly that spot rose markedly [4]. A review gathering 25 years of work on this found the same tendency holding up for the most part: hold a movement in mind as the thing not to do, and under pressure it is the movement that comes out [10].

"Just don't double fault this time."

"...Okay."

The child walks onto the court with the double fault freshly planted in their head.

What a child needs, in the end, is neither advice nor a frame of mind, but a routine of their own to run through just before the serve.

What a child can do just before the serve

What helps gets decided in practice, not during the match. Franziska Lautenbach and her colleagues had 29 experienced players hit second serves with and without pressure, and taught half of them a pre-serve routine over four weeks.

The order ran like this: look at the ball, breathe out while straightening the strings, pick the spot in the service box where the ball should land, look down at the feet and bounce the ball eight times, then name the target silently. Before the routine, pressure pulled the number of successful serves down sharply. Four weeks later, that drop was gone [5].

In the same experiment, though, the group that never learned the routine did not drop under pressure in the first place, so this one result does not prove the routine works. The players were adults, too. It is still worth borrowing from when a second serve is coming apart.

A fixed order of actions, run the same way before every serve, is what gets called a pre-performance routine (PPR). It keeps out the conscious self-monitoring of the wrist or the height of the elbow, and leaves anxious thoughts no room to get in [2], [3]. A review of the ways to help players who come apart under pressure found reasonable support for routines done before performing [7].

It helps to build a short, consistent five-step routine with the child.

1. The same foot position. The feet go in the same place on every point.
2. The same number of bounces. A count fixed in advance, whether the game is going well or badly. Repeating the same action regardless of the score is what makes it a routine [8].
3. One breath out. Longer out than in. The routine Lautenbach's group taught had an exhale in it before the serve too [5].
4. One thing to look at. A single spot in the service box, not the arm and not the motion. Settling on something to do, rather than calling to mind something not to do — which is the direction the experiments above point in [3], [10].
5. Go, without hesitating. When the routine ends, the serve starts. Linger, and the tension can come flooding back. A bad toss, though, is reason to start the routine over from the top.

That routine is only an example. The order and the length differ from one player to the next. Rafael Nadal wrote about his own habits in his autobiography: "Some call it superstition, but it's not. If it were superstition, why would I keep doing the same thing over and over whether I win or lose?" It is, he added, "a way of placing myself in a match, ordering my surroundings to match the order I seek in my head" [9]. It helps to let the child settle on their own order.

What to bring to the coach

The result of the self-check is worth talking through with the coach in specifics.

• If it points to technique: "Eleven faults out of fifty relaxed, thirteen out of fifty under pressure." Passing the numbers on as they are works best.
• If it points to choking: "Alone they miss eleven, with someone watching they miss thirty. Could we build a routine together?" Asking the coach to help find a way for the child to get through the pressure on their own is the better request.

It takes four weeks

A new routine can feel awkward to the child for the first week or two. It helps to write the numbers down at every session. After four weeks, the two sets of fifty get hit again, and the fault rate under pressure can be compared against the first time.

Four weeks is also how long Lautenbach's group spent teaching their players, who were coached each week and repeated the routine on their own around 230 times across the month [5]. One or two attempts cannot settle it. Anything technical is worth talking over with the coach in charge.