The jump serve is an aggressive overhand volleyball serve designed to score quickly and, as you will see in this sports video, is very difficult to return.
Move 10 or 15 feet behind service line
Toss the ball up & in front
Make a left-right-left approach
Keep hitting hand firm
Todd is the head coach for the University of Central Florida's women's volleyball team. Prior to that he coached as USC where they competed in the division one final four. He has also been a part of the coaching delegation for the USA women's team in the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, Greece. He was an assistant at Michigan University early in his career and simply loves the sport and coaching it where ever he is.
TODD DAGENAIS: In another clip, we talked about how to serve the basic serve from the ground. Here, we have Annie again from Castle Rock and we have our assistant coach Sam from New York City, and they're going to show you how to jump serve. The game is really becoming much more dynamic in the last couple of years, and one of the biggest inventions has been the invention of the jump serve. And there's two different ways of doing this. You're going to see Annie go through and Annie is going to do what we call a jump float. That's basically taking the same float serve that you use on the ground, jumping up in the air and hitting that ball as hard and as flat as you can. One of the ways that you do that, you start in the same body position that you normally would if you're just standing on the ground with the exception of you move about 10 or 15 feet back behind the service line. From there, you still toss the ball up in front of your hitting shoulder but you do an approach. So Annie is going to toss that ball up in front of her hitting shoulder and she's going to do a left, right-left approach where she will jump up, she will hit the ball with a very firm hand - Remember, we talked about our hand being firm like a tennis racket - very firm hand driving that serve as flat and as fast as possible. This is great way to accelerate the ball while still getting the floating effect of the ball moving, knuckling at the serve receiver. That's Annie's jump flow. Now, over here, Sam, Sam is using something that's used a lot more in the men's game which is the jump top spin. What's amazing about the jump top spin is the better players in the world are hitting in excess of 75 to 80 miles an hour over the course of 60 feet. That's like a fast ball moving about 120 miles an hour. So the only thing that's different about the jump serve versus the jump float serve is that the toss may be with a little bit of top spin on it. You're going to run a little bit more underneath the ball. You're going to reach up and you're going to snap the ball so the ball is served with top spin. That top spin is going to allow the ball to clear the net and drop in front of or around of the passers that are passing it. Again, both the jump float and the jump top spin are great weapons, and I highly encourage you to learn each part of that game to really accelerate your ability to serve the ball.
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