Learning to serve: it's all about the toss

Did you know that before you can serve a volleyball, you have to toss it up in the air? Well sure, now that you think about it, that sounds logical enough. But little did I know that when I went for my serving lesson with junior defensive specialist Joanna Mandecki of the women's volleyball team, it would be the three-foot toss up into the air that would pose the greatest hardship for me to overcome.

It was second nature to Joanna, who was kind enough to share her wisdom about serving with me yesterday. When we started the lesson, she focused immediately on some strategic aspects of the serve, like where to hit the ball, how to move my arm and how to aim for a three-foot margin over the net — a very small margin of error. We quickly discovered, however, that I had a more basic, fundamental and baffling issue — my toss.

I like to think of myself as reasonably athletic. I play club soccer and was a tri-varsity athlete in high school, so wouldn't you think I could toss a volleyball?

This is not to say that my hits were perfect. I would hit it low and into the net or serve up skyscrapers that reached heights of 25 feet before falling on the other side of the net — long enough for the other team to have a picnic and discuss how to best kill the ball back in my direction. On the whole, though, my actual serve wasn't that atrocious. She was maybe even slightly impressed and started showing me how to hit a "float serve," the predominant college serve and one that uses absolutely no spin on the ball. But that was only on the one out of four times, generously speaking, that I could hit the toss I threw up in front of me.

When we discovered my ineptitude, Joanna started giving me pieces of advice. Apparently I was trying a little too hard to bank on the knowledge I had from other sports to try to hit the perfect serve. She very nicely explained that, to my chagrin, this was not a heave in from centerfield in a softball game, but rather a very controlled motion.

We thought that it would be best if I created a routine. All of the girls on the team have something they do every time before they hit the ball. Joanna hits the ball hard into the ground a few times to warm up her arm since she often finds herself called upon to come off the bench in clutch situations to hit the game-winning ace or get the team going. Then she pushes, not dribbles, the ball toward the ground a few times — she corrected my one-handed attempt to recreate my foul shot routine — pauses and tosses it up in the air to hit the perfect serve. Whenever she patiently demonstrated her style, her serve would always land right in front of me as I waited on the other side of the court to attempt to serve it back.

So I tried my own. Basically, I copied her routine but simplified it a little. One hit, two "dribbles" and serve. The pause got lost in translation. I was trying to make it one fluid motion — the expression is applied liberally in other sports, so why not try it here? Well, because I should have listened to Joanna, and she didn't tell me to. No pause meant no serve because my toss would semi-wildly wind up behind me, too far in front or way off to one side or the other, but never straight up in front.

Apparently, the "bow-and-arrow" middle-school teaching technique that she tossed into the mix somewhere early on made too much of an impression on me, and my loading the bow became something like a disco dance move with my arm going nearly in a complete circle before hitting the ball. Needless to say, it wasn't so controlled.

Once again, she demonstrated her routine, the simplistic nature of the powerful serve she sends over the net time and time again. Despite standing a towering 5'0", she made it look so effortless, and here I was putting in much more effort to no avail. With at least five inches on her, I thought I must be able to hit it over the net with some sort of power — and again, it all came back to my stupid toss.

With all of Joanna's advice circling in my head, I finally put together all of the pieces. I had to use my abs and snap my back as my fully extended arm came over and hit the soft, simple toss in front of me. As my pride wouldn't let me leave until I had mastered this task, I can proudly say that I did finally figure it out in the end. Fortunately for my sake, that moment of clarity came to me just as the rest of the varsity women's volleyball team entered the gym for practice. I even got some applause from a couple of the early birds at practice, which balanced their laughter.

Now I just have to deal with my red, throbbing hand and wrist after hitting the ball so many times.