Walk onto any junior court in Sarasota on a Tuesday afternoon and you will see the same scene: a ten-year-old swinging as hard as their arm allows, balls landing two feet long, then two feet wide, then into the net. The coach claps anyway. The parent claps anyway. Everyone walks away feeling like progress happened, because the swings looked athletic.
I am Michael Boothman, a USPTA Elite Professional and the founder of SRQ Tennis. I have spent more than thirty years coaching juniors in Sarasota, and I want to push back on that scene. Power without placement is not development. It is a habit you will have to undo later, usually around the time the player starts losing to opponents who simply keep the ball in the court.
This is the first of the Six Pillars I teach every player at our Potter Park and Pineview programs: Accuracy Before Everything. Placement before power. Eight balls out of ten to a target before you are allowed to push the pace. It is the least flashy pillar I work on, and it is also the one that changes a junior’s game the fastest.
What “accuracy before everything” actually means
The simplest way I can put it: if you cannot hit the spot at 70% effort, you have no business trying to hit it at 90%. Most coaches reverse this. They teach a full swing first and then spend the next two years asking the kid to “calm down” and “place it.” That is backwards. Motor learning research has been clear for decades that the brain encodes whatever you repeat. If you repeat wild swings, you are wiring in wild swings. If you repeat controlled, targeted swings, you are wiring in a controllable forehand.
The International Tennis Federation’s coaching research has emphasized for years that the constraint of a target accelerates learning more than any verbal cue a coach can give. A kid will reorganize their swing path, their footwork, and their racket face faster trying to hit a cone than they ever will trying to follow a checklist of technique instructions. The target does the coaching for you. Your job is to pick the right target.
The drill: 8-of-10 to the deep corner
Here is the exact drill I run with my private students and in our 10 & Under group at Potter Park. It takes about fifteen minutes. You need a basket of balls, four cones, and a player who is willing to keep score honestly.
Setup. Place two cones on the deuce side of the opponent’s baseline: one about three feet inside the singles sideline, one about three feet from the center hash. The space between them — roughly a six-foot box in the deep corner — is the target. Repeat the same setup on the ad side.
The reps. The player stands on the baseline. I feed live balls (not from a basket, not from a machine — live, because that is the second pillar, Live Ball Is the Method) at a pace the player can handle comfortably. The first goal: eight of ten forehands land inside the deuce-side target box. We count out loud. If they get to eight before the tenth ball, they earn a rest. If they do not, we go again.
The catch. They are not allowed to swing harder than 70% effort. I tell them: “Smooth, accurate, repeatable.” If a ball goes into the target but the swing looked rushed or out of control, it does not count. The point is not to fluke eight in. The point is to find the swing speed at which they can produce eight in on demand, every time.
Progression. Once they hit eight of ten on both sides at 70%, we move to 80%. Then we move the target deeper. Then we shrink it. The pace only goes up after the placement holds. This is non-negotiable in my lessons.
What you will see in the first three sessions
The first session is humbling. A junior who looked like they had a “good forehand” at full swing usually hits three or four of ten into the target. They are surprised. The parent is surprised. I am not.
The second session, almost always, the number jumps to six or seven. Nothing about their technique has changed. What has changed is their attention — they are now watching the ball into the racket because they have a reason to. They are also unconsciously cleaning up their contact point, because a sloppy contact point will not hit a six-foot box no matter how good your swing looks on video.
By the third session, the player is at eight of ten on at least one side. Now we have a foundation. Now I am willing to start talking about pace, about spin, about court positioning. Before that, I am not. The fourth pillar — Confidence Is Built, Not Given — kicks in here. The player can see their own progress in a real number. They do not need me to tell them they are getting better. They have evidence.
Why this matters more in Sarasota than people think
Sarasota is a tennis town. Between the public parks, the private clubs, the academies up in Lakewood Ranch, and the year-round outdoor season, there is no shortage of court time. What there is a shortage of, in my experience after three decades here, is patient skill-building. The local culture rewards the kid who looks like a player — full swings, big serves, dramatic follow-throughs — long before that kid has earned the right to swing that way.
I have coached a lot of juniors who arrived from other programs hitting 100 mph forehands that landed in the doubles alley. We spend the first month at SRQ Tennis dialing them back to 65 mph forehands that land where I asked. They hate it for two weeks. By week four, they are beating opponents they used to lose to, because tennis is decided by the ball that goes in the court, not the ball that almost did. That is the trade I am asking every parent to make: a little less wow now, a lot more wins later.
What to do at home
If you are a parent reading this and your junior plays anywhere in Sarasota — at our program, at another club, or just at the public courts off and on — here is the one thing I would ask you to do this week. Stop praising the hard swing. Start praising the ball that lands where they aimed. Ask them where they were trying to hit it. If they cannot tell you, that is the conversation to have, not the swing mechanics.
Accuracy comes first. Power comes second. Everything else — the topspin, the depth control, the angle game, the serve placement — builds on top of an honest 8-of-10 number. Without that number, you are stacking floors on a foundation that has not been poured.
If you want to see how we run this with juniors week to week, our community programs at Potter Park and Pineview are open to drop-ins. Bring a notebook. Watch one session. Count how many balls land in the target box. That number will tell you more about a player’s development than any highlight clip ever will.
See you on the court.
— Coach Michael