Service return help

Hi guys, please can you give me some advice on playing a good return of serve and reading an opponents serve, I think this is my biggest weakness and I lose many of my games because of this 1 problem, I dread looking at my opponent's at the other side of the table all using crazy spinny serves that I have no idea what to do with, I either go into the net or miss the table, and even when I return them a lot of the time it is too high and they can just smash the ball past me, I have tried everything and it is very frustrating, a lot of the time I just hit the ball hard and hope for the best, but this only works rarely, also do you have any advice on how to make my own serves more effective, I do have a good range of skinny serves but I don't know when to use each serve and I tend to just play them at random to mix things up, any help is appreciated. Thanks.

Matt

Hi Matt,

Big question.  Learning to recognise spin is the first step.  With this you need to watch the contact of their serve.  Then it is a matter of learning the angle of you racket that you need to return that spin.

We have 2 whole sections of our site dedicated to these two topics.  Receiving Secrets and Serving Secrets.