[Venus Forever]

This is why she very rarely beats top players anymore.

She normally gets them around the first time because they are so thrown off by the lack of speed.

Surprisingly, the lack of speed is a good strategy, I guess. It just throws everyone off.

 

[Venus Forever]

I saw her play doubles at the US open last year and agree w/ Doc,.. once she gets the ball in play, she has great groundstrokes and a solid overall game.

her serve, well, again and again we see that in women's tennis it is important to have a good serve, but not critical. Many players w/ relatively weak second serves have won many tournaments and have acheived high rankings (Hingis, Venus for example). Even Kimmie C, our new #1, has a relatively benign serve. its not bad by any measure, but its not a weapon. Capriati as well, her serve mainly is used to just get a point started.

anyway, the point is that in the women's game, having a GREAT serve can help you immensely, however, having a bad serve doesn't hurt you as much as it would in the mens game. imho.

Venus' second serve is not as weak as Hingis' and Dementieva's. In fact, you could see the improvement of Venus' second serve at Wimbledon. It was consistently in the high 80s to low 90s range. That's fast for a second serve. At Melbourne she was hitting it low 80s. She has improved it much this year.

Hingis' and Dementieva's second serves were always in the 70s and still are, except, Elena's sometimes goes into the 60s. I think it's strange, but, I think Hingis' serve was a lot better than Elena's.