The body serve is the most neglected delivery in the game

Servers chase the lines and forget that the hardest ball to return is the one aimed straight at the returner's hip.

Wide or down the T. That is the whole vocabulary for most players, and the two corners of a service box are where every practice basket ends up going. The third target, straight at the returner, gets treated as a mistake that happened to work.

It is not a mistake. A ball arriving at the hip of the dominant side takes away the one thing a returner needs most, which is space to swing. Go wide and the returner steps out and swings freely. Go down the T and they step in and swing freely. Aim at the body and they must first decide whether to play forehand or backhand, then move their feet away from the ball to create room, and do both inside about half a second. Most returners freeze on the decision and end up jammed, elbow in, hitting a short weak ball off the frame or the edge of the string bed.

The tactical value goes beyond the individual point. Corner serves train a returner to shift laterally and commit early. A returner who has been beaten twice out wide starts leaning that way, and it is exactly then that the body serve is most effective, because the lean has closed the space they would otherwise use. The corners create the conditions for the body serve to work, which is why I would think of it as the third leg of a pattern rather than a substitute for the others.

There is a bonus that servers rarely price in. The body serve has the largest margin for error of the three, because the target is nowhere near a line. A wide serve missed by six inches is a fault. A body serve missed by six inches is still a body serve. On a second serve, or at four all in a third set with the arm tightening, that margin is worth a great deal more than the extra two miles an hour you were chasing.

The reason nobody hits it is aesthetic, I suspect. Aces down the T look like tennis. A returner shanking a jammed forehand into the tramlines looks like the returner made an error, and the server gets no credit.

Take the credit later. Take the point now.