(Informal) Serve Speed Survey of US College and Junior Tennis

Last week, I had the privilege of traveling to the 2007 Easter Bowl Championships in Rancho Mirage, California with my new client, who played in the Girls’ U18 Easter Bowl ITF tournament. During our trip, I wanted to conduct an informal survey of serve speeds demonstrated by the various players that participated in that very prestigious National junior tournament.

As it turned out, I had the opportunity to measure serve speeds for some college and pro players as well. We arrived in LA a few days before the start of the Easter Bowl tournament and caught the very competitive dual match between the #1 ranked Stanford women and the 10^th-ranked UCLA women (which ended up 4-3 for Stanford), and I was able to record serve speeds for the Stanford and UCLA players who played #1 and #2 singles. I also recorded the serve speeds of one of the tour players I coach who happened to be in LA that weekend.

Unfortunately, my new client lost her first round match at the Easter Bowl, and we came back to LA and spent two days training at UCLA. During those two days, I was also able to measure the serve speeds of some of the starters(#1, 2, 4 and 6) for the UCLA men’s team, as well as the serve speeds of a Bruin alumnus who is currently ranked in the Top 250 in the ATP rankings.

So, without further ado, here is a brief summary of the serve speeds—for both first and second serves—I measured over the course of our 6 day visit to SoCal. For brevity, I’m reporting the range of serves (fastest and slowest) I measured for each of the levels I observed from ATP to NCAA D1 all the way down to the 14 and under boys and girls at the Easter Bowl.

My “survey” is by no means exhaustive, but I was able to measure a wide range of male and female players from Top 3 seeded players to first-time National tournament participants. Unfortunately, we left the desert before the start of the Boys 18s tournament, so I wasn’t able to take any measurements from their age group.

ATP Men—first serve: 101 to 122 MPH; second serve: 78 to 90 MPH

NCAA Men—first serve: 82 to 104 MPH; second serve: 69 to 85 MPH

NCAA Women—first serve: 64 to 89 MPH; second serve: 64 to 74 MPH

U18 Girls—first serve: 67 to 96 MPH; second serve: 63 to 75 MPH

U16 Boys—first serve: 75 to 105 MPH; second serve: 67 to 82 MPH

U16 Girls—first serve: 65 to 83 MPH; second serve: 58 to 70 MPH

U14 Boys—first serve: 63 to 87 MPH; second serve: 55 to 69 MPH

U14 Girls—first serve: 57 to 73 MPH; second serve: 53 to 64 MPH

Oh, and if you are wondering, the fastest serve I measured (122 MPH) was struck by my pro client who has been training with the SpeedChain since last fall.

I hope you will find these results interesting and informative…

TTFN!

My own SpeedChain testimonial

Maybe you guys would like to know how I got involved with the revolutionary SpeedChain in the first place…

It all began innocently enough with me trolling the mighty Internet for information on speed training, specifically for ideas and methods for increasing racket speed in tennis.

You see, coming from an academic background (I’m a trained, published scientist—my doctorate is in biology, if you’re wondering), I have a very empirical approach to virtually everything I do. My brother calls me a “professional deconstructionist” as I want to analyze, breakdown and question every idea that attracts my interest.

So, when in late 2005, I happened onto a link that led me to an online column written by a Hawaii-based golf teacher who claimed to have invented the ideal golf training aid—a training aid that supposedly delivered unheard of improvement in clubhead speed in a very short timeframe—it dawned on me that I might have stumbled onto something promising.

As I read that first column, two things occurred to me right away.

First, the scientific concept behind the training aid, called the SpeedChain, was dead on correct. Second, because the concept was so sound, this meant that some layman (not one of the “esteemed” sports science minds of our day) had solved one of the long-standing challenge of sports conditioning.

What this golf teacher did was find and develop a training method (and device) to increase the speed at which the human body performs complex movements that involves the coordination of multiple body parts moving in a complex sequence through multiple joint angles and planes. Sports science has long acknowledged that no known conditioning methods have been proven to increase the throwing, swinging and kicking speeds of athletes from all levels of sport.

So, in essence, this layman, golf teacher has effectively solved the “holy grail” of athletic conditioning that has eluded the so-called “experts” in sports training and conditioning.

About 5 seconds after I came to this realization, all the alarm bells and red flags in my mind went off about how what I had just read was simply “too good to be true”. That is what we are conditioned to think, after all, when we run into something that promises and claims to deliver the solution to a problem that supposedly the best minds in the world haven’t been able to solve.

How could some golf teacher with no real scientific training have come up with the solution to one of the challenging questions of sports science?

Well, as the weeks passed, I got over those prejudices and realized that this longstanding challenge of sports science could only have been solved by an outsider who wasn’t biased and brainwashed by the so-called experts. And, believe me, there is a ton of bias, prejudice, dogma and ego that lurks in the sports science and conditioning community (as it does everywhere!).

Finally, I decided to call up the golf teacher and made an appointment to demo his invention called the SpeedChain. And once I put the SpeedChain into my hands and began to swing it and tried the special exercises that can only be done with the SpeedChain, it became obvious that the SpeedChain was going to deliver on its promise of improving racket speed…Or bat speed, or golf clubhead speed, for that matter.

Once anyone who has been any background or experience as a competitive athlete puts the SpeedChain into their hands, they will “intuitively” understand why the SpeedChain will deliver on its promise to make them swing faster than ever before.

The only question was, how well was it really going to work? As the golf teacher had no quantitative information on how much racket speed improvement was possible by training with the SpeedChain, the scientist inside me led me to propose doing a pilot study where together we would study the effects of SpeedChain training on two, young (a 13 and a 14 year old) tournament players I was coaching at the time.

We decided to follow the changes in the boys’ serve and groundstroke speeds over a 10 week long training program using the SpeedChain. Outside of interval running over the same 10 week period, the boys performed no other conditioning exercises outside of training with the SpeedChain. As the boys trained only with the SpeedChain, whatever speed improvement they would show would have to be due to the effects of SpeedChain training.

The results of this pilot study were nothing short of remarkable. Both boys increased their 1^st serve speed by over 25 MPH in 8 weeks. One started at in the high 60s and ended up hitting regularly in the low 90s, and the other started in the middle 70s and ended up in the low 100s.

And for you skeptics, there were no major technical adjustments to their service motions involved, only training with the SpeedChain: no plyometrics, no medicine balls, no resistance bands, and no strength training was performed during that time. None.

So, guess what? I’m a believer. Theory is one thing, hard, quantitative evidence is another. SpeedChain training works. Training with the SpeedChain more than delivered on its promise to help players increase their racket speed. The evidence doesn’t lie. Both boys increased their racket speeds significantly on both serves and groundstrokes.

Does my story seem to be “too good to be true”? What I’m actually finding out is that the results for the boys in that pilot study may not be at all exceptional. Those results may represent average improvements given what I’ve observed with the college players and touring pros I’ve introduced to the SpeedChain. Some of those players improved 10 to 15 MPH on their serve after their FIRST WORKOUT ever with the SpeedChain.

So, what’s the bottom line?

1) SpeedChain training increases your racket speed (and more).

2) All other training methods don’t increase your racket speed, and many of them will make you swing slower instead.

Theory and reality and one and the same with the SpeedChain.

I know that many of you out there are thinking that the SpeedChain is "too good to be true".

Well, I used to be just like you until I found out the real truth with my own hands and eyes.

If you want more racket speed, there’s only one answer. Train with the SpeedChain.

TTFN!