It’s a simple matter of geometry that if you graze the ball toward the back when serving backspin, you will either hit too much downward and so your serve will be high, or you will have to graze the ball less and so get less spin.

What does this mean? It means that to get a really heavy and short backspin when serving, you have to contact the ball near the bottom, almost as if you are scooping the ball. It takes touch, but with practice any player can learn to do so. The key is that you don’t do this by slowing down your serving stroke for control, as many do; instead, you accelerate into the ball with great racket speed, but barely graze the ball as it drops onto your paddle. This will result in a very heavy and short backspin serve.

If you do this, you’ll have the feeling that you are almost struggling to get the ball to go over the net. This is because you’ll have little downward motion, and with little downward motion, the ball isn’t being hit downward, and so it doesn’t easily bounce upwards and over the net. In fact, this will force you to accelerate even more into the serve as you struggle to get it over the net. When you find yourself accelerating into the ball and grazing it finely, and barely able to get it over the net . . . the ball will not only have a lot of backspin, it’ll likely come to a stop or even bounce backward on the far side of the table!!!