The impact of the serve

The routine, Utah State sophomore Maddie Day said, is always the same.

The routine clears her mind. The routine helps her focus.

“For me, I dribble the ball three times,” Day said. “And then I go.”

Coaches in every sport preach the importance of fundamentals. In volleyball, the serve is fundamental.

“I’ve learned that volleyball comes down to who serves the best and who receive serves the best,” said head coach Grayson DuBose. “If you can do those two skills better than everyone else, you probably are going to win the majority of the matches you play.”

A good serve will throw the other team off-balance, forcing it into uncomfortable positions.

“That’s how we approach it,” DuBose said. “It’s our first line of defense. It’s our chance to help our defense get a little bit better.”

Leading up to a game, the coaching staff will watch film, looking for weaknesses in the opponent’s defense. If a particular player struggles controlling a serve attempt, for example, the Aggies might target her when she’s on the court. Opponents who struggle aiming their passes might also be targeted.

“If we serve it well enough, we can get them what we call ‘out of system,’ which means it’s not a perfect pass and now they have to go scramble and they have to set someone they may not want to set,” DuBose said.

The Aggies saw firsthand what good serves can do to a defense when they played the now-No. 1 USC Trojans on Sept. 10.

“People like [senior outside hitter Samantha] Bricio from USC, she had a tough serve and that was a difficult one to pick up,” said defensive specialist Tasia Taylor, the only freshman to appear in every set for USU this season.

Bricio recorded eight service aces in a three-set sweep of the Aggies.

When returning a serve, Taylor said, the goal is to put the offense in the best position possible.

“You try to hit the setter, in front of the ten-foot line preferably,” Taylor said. “We have a position that we try to always aim for.”

But when the serve is placed in a position that makes it hard to control, as Bricio was able to do and as the Aggies work on every day in practice, it limits the options for the receiving team.

“We want them to pass it behind [the ten foot line],” Day said. “Then the setter has to run and go try to throw it out to someone, whereas if it’s a perfect pass they can run any set that they want.”

“If we can serve well enough maybe it takes the middle out of it and now our block is better because we only have to attend to two things instead of three,” DuBose said. “It takes away options typically.”

The strategy, then, is “to drive it hard and deep,” as DuBose described it, into the holes in the defense.

“We don’t try and serve it right at the person,” Day said. “We want to serve it in between two people so they have to communicate.”

While placement is important, the type of serve also has an impact. Some serves are much harder to return than others.

“That’s the beauty of the float serve,” DuBose said. “If you hit it right — you pop it low enough — it will float like a knuckle ball in baseball. It takes these unpredictable paths: it’s dropping, it’s rising, it’s doing all this kind of stuff.”

The jump float serve — Day’s preferred serve — is hit with an open palm and no rotation on the ball, which causes the unpredictable movement. Sophomore middle blocker Carly Lenzen relies on the standing variation of the float serve.

“She can drive it nice and deep into the back end of the court, and that’s how she gets her aces,” DuBose said.

Day prefers the jumping float, she said, because it allows her to get a high toss and high contact. After dribbling the ball three times to clear her mind, she takes two steps to gather momentum before tossing the ball in the air. The power in her swing is generated by the force of the jump.

Junior outside hitter Kaylie Kamalu, on the other hand, attacks the defense with another serve altogether; she uses a spinning floater, or “sploater,” as DuBose called it.

“We’re just going to let her hit it really hard,” DuBose said. “Sometimes it will spin off her hand, sometimes it will float off her hand. It takes all these unpredictable flights.”

With so many options, the players and coaches work together to balance serving hard and keeping the serves under control.

“It’s a fine line between going back and serving the hardest serve ever and serving it easy,” DuBose said.

The young Aggies have struggled to find that line so far this season. After only three service errors in a home win against San Jose State on Oct. 10, for example, USU recorded nine service errors in two games against San Diego State and Nevada on Thursday and Saturday.

It can be frustrating, but it’s part of the learning process, DuBose said.

“As a coach you have to be willing to take the misses with the makes,” DuBose said. “You have to be willing to let them — especially if they’re young in the game — experiment with the serve to see what they can and can’t do with it and then what they can do in a match.”

The Aggies have invested a significant amount of practice time this season into improving their play on serves.

“We’ll spend the first half hour of practice working on serves and serve receive,” DuBose said. “That’s how important we think it is.”

Although the improvement hasn’t come soon enough for USU to compete for the conference title this season, the players have noticed the foundation being laid.

“We serve all throughout practice, throughout the various drills that we do,” Day said. “You don’t really have to think about it as much after you do it awhile.”

Successful repetition — in practices and in games — strengthens the players’ trust in their serves.

“It’s really just a mental game,” Day said. “Being confident in what you’re able to do and then going back and performing that.”

In an inherently team-oriented sport, the serve stands out as a “blocked skill,” DuBose said.

“It’s like shooting a free throw,” he continued. “It’s just you and the ball.”

Just you and the ball.

Three dribbles.

A deep breath.

Two steps, gather momentum, throw the ball in the air.

Then go.

— thomas.sorenson@aggiemail.usu.edu

Twitter: @tomcat340