How To Return a Sidespin Serve

Dear coach,

i have a friend here that has an easy looking serve but really hard to handle. he serves just like a normal backhand push serve but his racket has a 90 degree angle and he pulls the racket sideways,not  forward. the ball bounces high enough for a smash but sharply turns its direction. even if i can get it into my racket the sidespin would make me miss the table. i tried to deal with it using the backhand topspin but it's never strong enough to keep the ball off the net.

how can i deal with this? my racket is an Andro Kinetic CF Light Off+ with a Xiom Sigma Pro rubber and Donic Coppa X1 on the other side. i'm having a little bit trouble using it too and i asked you a question about it.

Thanks,

Bill

Hi Bill,

It is good that you can describe what is happening as that will help you counter the problem. You have a few options. You could try and push the ball back. The better option though is to topspin the ball if it is long which it sounds like you are trying to do. If the ball has a lot of backspin then you need your backhand topspin to be a more vertical stroke. You also need to make sure you are brushing up the back of the ball to get plenty of backspin. You'll need to get the bat moving quite fast to generate the topspin with this action.

Take a look at our video on the Backhand Topspin Off Backspin. It will go into more detail about how to execute this stroke.