Beginner's Guide on How to Overhand Serve in Volleyball
OVERHAND SERVING FOR BEGINNERS
KEY POINTS FOR SERVING IN VOLLEYBALL
A crucial skill in beach volleyball is acquiring the knowledge of how to serve with accuracy and consistency. In the video below, Coach Ali gives the perfect breakdown on how to overhand serve in beach volleyball with some of our athletes from the St. Pete Beach Training Camp.
These are the key points Ali covered, in the above video, for beginners to keep in mind when starting your journey in beach volleyball serving.
POWER VS. ACCURACY
Consistency is the main point we started discussing when learning how to serve in beach volleyball. This brings us to the often asked question -- "Is it better to serve with power or with accuracy?
Watch the video below with our Brandon Joyner in Hermosa Beach, California, as he details the benefits of both power and accuracy, and how a happy marriage between the two will help you to become the best server on the beach.
The video above is an example of a lesson from our beach volleyball serving course.
In this video, we break down the idea of serving aggressively or serving accurately. Obviously, you want both in your serving repertoire, but we do talk about the advantages of both.
We get asked numerous time about what's more important when you're serving: "Having a powerful serve or having an accurate serve?" I don't know if there's a correct answer for any specific player because I think it has more to do with you finding the correct ratio or the correct balance for you as a beach volleyball player.
For instance, Brandon Joyner and Mark Burik are going to have different ratios depending on the type of player that they are. It can be said, however, that for beginners, it is crucial to your development as a player to start with accuracy. You should be able to hit a spot on the court 8 times out of 10 before you think about hitting the surf hard. As you progress in your game and you go from a beginner beach volleyball player to an intermediate beach volleyball player, and an intermediate to an advanced beach volleyball player, or an advanced player to a pro beach volleyball player, you are going to realize what serves and what power to accuracy ratio is going to help you the most.
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There's a couple players that I think have really found their ratio and are using it to help them win points. The first person is Jeremy Casebeer. Jeremy Casebeer is known as a power player. When he goes back to surf, he is okay with missing serves because he wants to give himself the opportunity to score while hitting a jump serve. So, if I had to say a ratio for Jeremy, I would say that he is probably at 70% power, 30% accuracy. And obviously as the game goes on, that might change a little bit. If he's having a great day, that power might go up to 80 percent. If he's having a day where he's missing a lot of serves, he might bump that down to 50 or 60 percent but he does that in order to make himself the most valuable server that he can be.
The next person that I thought about was Bill Kolinske. Bill Kolinske was able to find success very, very quickly. And the first thing that I've noticed about Bill is that he's not a flashy player. Hopefully he doesn't take offense to me saying that, but I would say that Bill focuses more on accuracy than he does power. It's very obvious that Bill is a very strategic player. He has conversations with his partner as he's walking back to serve almost every single time. And I think what he's doing is he's telling his partner, 'Hey, I'm going to serve "this", because of "this".'
A lot of times, we don't see a lot of up and down serves, but for some reason Bill has found a way to do this and with that has come a lot of success. He has figured out a way to say 'If I can put the ball two feet from the net and make that passer go up and make a pass and then get back and try to hit that, they're going to be in more trouble than if I hit this ball hard at them.'
So it's important for you to find your ratio and figure out: Are you a more power beach volleyball player, are you a more accurate beach volleyball player?
But I think it is safe to say for everyone that if you start out thinking about accuracy and then start to move with power, that's going to give you the best scenario possible to make you the most valuable server that you can be.
