After the match between Victoria Azarenka and Jelena Jankovic in Cincinnati, that had something like 20 breaks of serve, I read some people asking about why the women are so much better at returning than serving. Do you have an opinion?—Jess
I tried to do my own speculating on this subject in an article for Tennis Magazine a few years ago. After talking to coaches and watching the men and women serve and return from up close at the U.S. Open for two weeks, I couldn’t come up with a single good explanation for the phenomenon. There are too many factors to pinpoint one.
Theories abounded, of course, some of them less credible than others: Women are passive and reactive by nature; they’re tempted by powerful racquets to go for too much; they never learned how to throw; etc.
Most interesting to me were the words of one Florida coach, who said that the instructional focus for promising young women players was about making their ground strokes powerful and consistent—that came first. The belief was that without the ability to hang in rallies and not get blown off the court, a player stood no chance in today’s women’s game. The serve, in this scenario, was a secondary consideration. This was a departure from the net-rushing past, when the serve had been an essential part of most players' attacking games. You had to have a good serve, after all, to be able to serve and volley. Today, as women’s ground strokes have become more powerful, so have their returns, which has made life even tougher on the server.
Racquets and strings have also tipped the scales toward the return in both the men’s and women’s games. The exception on the WTA side is obviously Serena Williams, to whom the serve seems to come so naturally. Serena and her sister Venus did spend a lot of time tossing footballs around when they were young. It’s often said that American men and women are better servers—and worse movers—because we grow up throwing footballs and baseballs, while the rest of the world is focused on their feet on the soccer field. And it’s true that some of the more powerful women servers now are from the U.S.—the Williams sisters, Madison Key,s Sloane Stephens, Coco Vandeweghe.
The match between Azarenka and Jankovic was a tough one to watch. Neither woman is a natural server, and each of them lost all confidence in the shot that night. Still, that was a special case; few serving exhibitions are that bad. While I would love for more WTA players to serve like Serena, it would be a mistake to criticize the women just because they can’t serve as well, or hold with the same consistency, as the men. Rallies, returns, and service breaks are entertaining, too.