Serving Strategies

Wednesday, November 7, 2018
Megan
Customer Service & Admin Specialist

If you came here looking for serving strategies in Wallyball, you’ve come to the right place! When I tried Googling it all I got was “Did you mean Volleyball?” No Google, I didn’t mean Volleyball; I meant what I said.

To start this article, I went to some Wallyball experts here at the ESSC World Headquarters (not me) to grab some knowledge on what would make a good service, the differences in serves and some strategies to work on. Here are my findings…

Similar to Volleyball, a good serve is one that lands in bounds each time so that you can continue to serve but is not easy enough for your opponents to play back to you every time. You want it to be playable but challenging for the other team.

There are two legal types of serves. One is the underhand serve which will generally give you more accuracy for placing the ball in your opponent’s court but can be much less powerful and easily returned by the other team. The other service is an overhand serve. This serve is very powerful but often times can be harder to aim, resulting in out of bounds serves. If you do hit with accuracy, however, it can be very difficult for your opponents to rally back to you.

Now to get down to what you came here for; strategy.

  1. Serving straight to the court – this is often for beginners who are just trying to get their serve in bounds or is used as a really basic serve to the other team.
    • You should aim to serve it as close to the back wall as possible since this makes it either difficult to hit back or difficult to decipher whether or not the ball will be in bounds.
  2. Serving with a bounce off one of the side walls – this takes a bit more skill but can add a lot of difficulty for the other team because they now have to play the angles of the bounce. Remember, you can only hit one wall when you serve the ball; you cannot hit two walls on your serve, or the roof and back walls specifically, as those would be considered out of bounds.
    • Try to get a wide angle on this serve by hitting it off the wall close to the net on your opponent’s side. This will make it both difficult to hit back and difficult to decide if the ball will be in bounds.
    • You can also try for an acute angle by serving it so it barely hits the side wall and falls softly to the ground beside the wall, making it very difficult to hit back.
  3. Serving to the weakest returner from the other team – this is a classic move in any team sport. This does mean you will have to be able to aim in that player’s direction even while they are rotate through their service order, but it can be a very effective strategy when serving.