Getting mindfulness into practice serving

I saw the following question in a coaching group:

What strategies do you have for helping your athletes with serving mindfulness during practice? I think it’s so terribly easy to just mindlessly go back to the serving line and serve, but then you get in a match and all the sudden you want to be laser focused.

I think this is a pretty simple one to answer. Make every serve in practice intentional and mindful.

How?

Don’t do drills where servers just serve to allow passing to happen. I’m talking about your bog standard serve & pass drill so many people use to work on reception. Instead, have the servers work on something specific and ensure they get coaching feedback and focus on that. Flip-Switch is an example of this. So too are servers vs. passers games like this one.

Same thing in games. Make sure each server is attempting something specific every ball. That could be through calling serves, even if you don’t necessarily do that in matches. Or maybe you use bonus points linked to serving objectives.

Do that and focused match serving will come naturally.