At the beginning of my summer camps, I often ask people what is the single-most important skill. Many will answer "passing" or "setting."

As I pointed out in a previous article, the correct answer is hitting - outside hitting to be exact.

Participants who feel serving is the most important skill are close to the truth. Serving is confidence. Coaches can keep track of many statistics on their laptops: passing, blocks, hitting percentage and digs. But the one skill they can look at to determine a players’ confidence level is serving.

Here are a variety of serving tips that will help you when you step to the line.

Coaches will do four things to disrupt the confidence of a server:

• Call a timeout
• Make a substitution
• Question or argue a call with a referee or linesperson
• A player on the court will tie his or her shoe or call to wipe up a wet spot on the floor.

All of these have the same effect. The coach is trying to "ice" the server. The best thing I can suggest to combat this is to establish a routine when you go to the service line.

You see this in basketball when a player goes to the free-throw line. They always do the same pre-shot ritual. The ritual acts as a calming force to center and focus their mechanics and thoughts.

I suggest you get a pre-serve ritual going as soon as possible. It could be bouncing the ball off the floor or slapping it on the side. Make sure it is the same each time.

I have people ask me all the time about teaching them how to be an effective jump server. My first question is "How well do you hit the ball?" "Not very well" is the response I get. Players need to learn not to put the cart before the horse. You should start jump serving when you hit the ball well. The other side of this argument is to work on jump serving in practice. Players need to hit 40-60 balls a day to build up arm strength.

Jump Serving Tips

1. Keep the ball in front of you as you take your approach to jump. Don’t drop the ball (and your hand) down to throw it in the air. One of the most crucial aspects of the jump serve is the set. You get a much better set when you don’t drop the ball down.
2. Throw the ball high when jump serving. The most frequent error I see in jump serving is players throwing the ball too low. When we throw the ball high, it gives us time to generate power with our arm swing.
3. Land in the court when jump serving. In the men’s game, jump servers should be landing about 3-4 feet inside the court. For the ladies, it’s 2-3 feet inside. Make sure you take off as close to the end line as possible. Give yourself some room for error. When you land behind the end line, you have to serve the ball at a longer distance, thus reducing the power and effectiveness of the serve.
4. Swing your arms back deep when approaching the jump serve. Coaches can watch a player hit 2 to 3 balls and know instantly how effective a hitter is based on one thing—how far they swing their arms back during their approach. Swinging your arms back is how we generate power on our hitting stroke and it is how we jump high. Throwing the ball high gives us time to bring our arms back.
5. Use the off-arm as a guide and as a source for power. If you ever watch a tennis match, notice how high the server reaches up with their off-arm and shoulder during their hitting motion. This is how we generate additional power. It also serves as a source of balance for the serving motion.

With float serving there is one main objective - indent the ball. Before I explain how to indent the ball, here are a few float serve tips:

Float Serving Tips

1. Look under the ball when you throw it up. Again, this is very similar to jump serving. The toss is critical to insure proper ball contact. You will have greater accuracy on where you want the serve to go.
2. Step into the ball when serving. If you are right-handed, you will step into the ball with your left foot to allow the torso more power in the serve. Do not do a crossover step that ends up with your right foot forward.
3. Hit the ball at the base of your hand when serving. When we serve, we want the base of the hand - not the open palm—to make contact with the ball to insure good contact with the ball. What most of us do is tilt our hand back to expose the two bones at the base of the wrist. It should feel like a "thud" instead of a slap when you serve.
4. Snap the ball. Do not hit it. If you could see a good float serve in slow motion, you would notice a snap from the elbow with a follow-through of the arm. The snap, not the arm, is what powers the ball. To teach this, I over-correct what players want to do and simply have them keep their hand up after they serve the ball. This forces all the action into the elbow to "indent" the ball. We’re taking the spin off the ball (the ball loses control and will knuckle into a passer’s arms). You are also getting extension, meaning the distance between the elbow and shoulder is upright and used in an effective manner.

Serving a jump float is a hybrid of the jump and float serves. The jump float gets you going toward your defensive position. You also contact the ball at a much higher point than a regular float serve. Similar to jump serving, start the ball high. It will help you with the control of your toss.

Olympian Pat Powers runs the successful Volleyball Clinics program in 19 cities across the nation. Visit www.vbclinics.com for more information. A special thanks to Ed Machado and the Encinitas Wave club for their assistance with this project.