SAMPRAS gives his personal tips on a serve with DISGUISE!

Practise having the same ball toss for all serves. “I didn’t have the fastest serve, but I did have the best, and the disguise helped. There’s no point serving fast if your opponent knows where the ball is going, that’s worthless. If you can have your opponent guessing, that’s worth a lot. People used to say to me, ‘I just couldn’t read your serve’. If your body shape is always the same, no matter what serve you’re hitting, and your service motion and the position of your racket are always the same too, your opponent is going to find it very difficult to read you. It’s all about your hand, your wrist and your grip. It’s not easy, so the earlier you start practising disguise the better. I did it from a very early age, as a kid, and so that went into my muscles, and my muscles had those memories. That’s why I was able to do that as an adult.”

Try this drill. “As a kid, my coach would make me do this drill where he would only tell me after I had tossed the ball where he wanted me to hit it. He would shout out, ‘out wide’ or ‘down the middle’ or he would ask me to handcuff the opponent with a body serve. That was great as it meant that my toss was always the same, and I didn’t know myself where I was going to hit it until right until the last moment. You can have some fun with this, waiting until as late as possible before being told where to hit the ball. Do that for hours and hours and you will improve your disguise.”

Improve your accuracy. “Accuracy is so important. If you can hit your spots, you’re going to cause problems for your opponents.”

Don’t get hung up on one serve – use as much variety as possible. “I think too many players get too fixated into going for the same spot, and that makes them too predictable, so hit all the serves you can, whether that’s out wide, down the ‘T’ or to the body. And learn to hit all the spins. Mix it up. Of course, I was able to hit the ball hard. But it was mixing it up, and disguising all those serves, that gave me a better package.”