Steady improvement has taken Andrey Rublev to consistently higher highs in the rankings over the last 15 months. There are many reasons for the Russian’s success, and if you watch Rublev play these days, it quickly becomes apparent that his serve is one of them.
Rublev is now serving over 220 KPH (136 MPH) when he used to top out at around 200 KPH (124 MPH). The World No.8 told Tennis Now today that he has worked a lot over the last years on the shot. He says his strength has been a key driver of serve velocity.
"For sure I improved my serve a lot,” he said. “First of all I was never serving even 200, now I am serving often 220, and this is amazing.”
Rublev says it isn’t just the first serve. He has also added velocity to his second serve.
“Before I was doing a lot of double faults and even if I was not doing double faults, my second serve was maybe 120 (KPH) or 100, something like that, so the players were killing it almost every time,” he said. “Now I'm serving much harder second, I'm changing directions. I mean still my second in average is not as strong as other players, but it is already, only with one year, I did maybe improve 20 KPH maybe, because I was serving 120, now I think the average of my second serve is 150 or something like that.”
The improvement is easy to see, but if you can’t tell with the naked eye, just look at the stats. Rublev averages 74 percent first-serve won and 50 percent second-serves won for his career, but this year those numbers are dramatically higher. He is winning 79 percent of his first-serve points and 54 percent of his second-serve points in 2021 (stats from before this week in Dubai).
Rublev served 322 aces in 57 matches in 2019 (5.65 aces per match). Since then he has served 537 aces in 66 matches (8.14 aces per match).
True to form Rublev says he can serve even better.
“In the end I did a huge improvement, but still I'm sure I can do better placement, I can still serve the second serve much harder because there are so many players who serve second serve so much harder, the top players, they serve second serves around 160, 170, so these thing I still can improve.”
Rublev says two things have helped him improve the serve more than anything else: strength, and his racquet.
“First of all I am stronger than I was two years ago,” he said. “Then I did some changes with the racquets, I was trying to find the right one so in the end all these details helped me a lot."