By Walter Villa

It’s late in a match, your team is down by a point, and it’s your turn to serve.

Chelsey Keoho, a senior libero for Kamehameha (Honolulu, Hawaii) has “definitely” felt pressure in that situation.

Don’t be surprised if you do, too.

“I believe in focusing on my breathing,” Keoho says. “I will pause, calm myself and then serve.”

But where? And how hard? And, what level of risk is acceptable?

“In general,” says Rick Butler, the coach of the Sports Performance club program based in Aurora, Ill., “you want to be aggressive but not reckless.

“It’s a fine line. But you don’t want to hit a lollipop serve that they will just spike down.”

Butler said teams average only about one ace per set --“if you can side out 50 percent, that’s good,” he says -- so rather than going for an ace, he wants a consistent serve targeted at a specific zone or at a deficient returner.

If that produces a weak reply, the server has done her job.

Coaches will typically use hand signals to let the team know where the serve should go. They will use a clipboard to hide the signal from the opposing team.

But the truth is that the opposing team often knows who its weakest returner is and where the serve will go. And, on the high school level, some servers will struggle to hit the called zone precisely.

But it’s all part of the strategy within the game.

One thing that is almost always true is that teams avoid serving to the libero, who is in the game specifically for her defense.

“That’s frustrating when I’m on defense,” says Caitlin Nolan, a libero for No. 6 Southlake Carroll (Southlake, Texas). “I just try to encourage my teammates. I also try to take up more of the court to try to force them to serve it to me.”

Keoho said she, too, will avoid the other team’s libero unless …

“If I see her struggling,” Keoho says, “then I will attack.”

There are three basic ways to attack on the serve.

1. Float serve: With your feet firmly on the ground, the goal is to hit a serve that lacks spin or rotation – like a knuckle ball in baseball. If done correctly, a floater just “dies” on the receiver.

2. Jump float serve: Same as the float serve except that there is a higher contact point and the ball travels with more velocity. This serve is used often in the women’s game.

3. Jump spin serve: This is the big serve in the men’s game. It gets on the receiver quickly and acts like a deep-court spike.

“The most important thing is to control the serve and not to have any arch,” Butler says. “A good serve will stay flat and almost skim the top of the net. We practice serving from the top of the net to no more than 3 feet above.

“If we can serve in that range consistently, it won’t give the other team much time to read it and set up. It gets on them quickly and makes it much tougher to pass.”

But serve strategy and understanding the situation can be just as important as technique.

“One of the golden rules of the game is to never miss a serve on game point or after a timeout,” Butler says. “If you are serving, and the other team calls timeout, that means you have momentum, and that’s something you don’t want to give up.”

Brooke Delano, an All-American middle blocker at the University of Nebraska, says one common error made by players who get on a serving hot streak is to try to hit each ball a bit harder than the previous one. This will eventually lead to a mistake by an out-of-control server, she says.

Instead of increasing the velocity, Delano says, a hot server should stay the course and keep doing what has been working.

And, no matter what the score is, Delano says it’s important not to get caught up in the emotion of the moment.

“Focus on your technique,” she says. “Walk yourself through the mechanics of the serve. Relax and do what you’ve done normally thousands of times before.”