If you walk past most tennis lessons in Sarasota, you’ll see the same thing: a player hitting forehand after forehand after forehand from the same spot. Twenty in a row, then twenty backhands, then twenty volleys. It looks productive. The player is grooving the stroke, the ball is going in, everyone feels good walking off the court.
I’m Michael Boothman, and after 30-plus years of coaching, I’ll tell you something that surprises a lot of parents: that kind of practice is one of the most reliable ways to make a player look great on the practice court and then fall apart in a match. The research calls it blocked practice, and while it feels better in the moment, it builds skills that don’t transfer to competition. Understanding why changed how I run every session at SRQ Tennis.
What blocked practice actually does
Blocked practice means repeating the same skill over and over with no interruption — all forehands, then all backhands, then all serves. Random practice means mixing it up — a forehand, then a serve, then a backhand volley, then another forehand from a different spot — so the player never quite settles into a rhythm.
Here’s the counterintuitive part. Decades of motor learning research, going back to the foundational work on what scientists call “contextual interference,” show that blocked practice produces better results during the practice session and worse results when it counts. Random practice produces messier, more error-filled practice sessions — and far better retention and transfer to new situations. The U.S. Tennis Association’s own player development resources lean heavily on this principle, and you can read a clear summary of the science on the USTA’s coaching education pages.
The reason is simple once you see it. When a player hits twenty forehands in a row, the brain stops solving the problem after the second or third ball. The grip, the spacing, the timing — it’s all loaded and ready. The player is essentially copying the last shot. But a tennis match never gives you the same shot twice in a row. Every ball arrives at a different height, speed, spin, and angle, and you have a fraction of a second to read it and respond. If you’ve only ever practiced in a state where the next ball is predictable, you’ve never trained the skill that actually wins matches: reading the ball and adjusting.
Why this is the heart of “Live Ball Is the Method”
This is exactly why one of the Six Pillars I coach by is Live Ball Is the Method. Live ball means real rallies and real, game-like situations — not fed balls dropped into the same spot, and not a ball machine firing identical shots to the same corner. A machine is the ultimate blocked-practice tool. It feels like hard work, the player hits hundreds of balls, and almost none of that effort shows up in a match, because the machine removes the one variable that matters most: unpredictability.
When I run a live-ball drill, the player has to read a real ball coming off a real racquet, decide what shot to play, and execute under a little bit of pressure. The session looks messier than a clean feeding drill. There are more errors. A parent watching from the fence might think the player is having an off day. But that mess is the point. Every miss is the brain doing the real work of learning — solving a slightly new problem each time instead of repeating a memorized answer.
What this looks like on the court
Let me be concrete, because vague advice helps no one. Say I’m working with a junior on the forehand. The blocked-practice version is twenty balls fed to the same spot. The random-practice version might be: a forehand from the middle, then a backhand, then a forehand on the run to the wide corner, then a short ball they have to move up to attack, then a high ball above the shoulder. Same number of forehands across the session — but each one arrives in a different context, the way it would in a point.
We track it with numbers, because Confidence Is Built, Not Given — another of the pillars — means I want evidence, not a pep talk. Early on, a player might land 8 out of 10 forehands to target in a blocked drill and only 5 out of 10 in the random version. That gap is normal and honest. It tells us exactly where the real skill level is. Over a few weeks, as the random number climbs from 5 to 7 to 8, we know we’re building something that will actually hold up when a tournament is on the line — not a practice-court illusion.
What this means for parents
If you’re a tennis parent in Sarasota choosing a program for your kid, here’s a practical filter. Watch a session. If the players spend most of the hour hitting the same shot from the same spot, or feeding off a machine for long stretches, the practice will look impressive and the kid will feel successful — but you should ask how much of it transfers to match play.
A good session should look a little chaotic in the best way. Players reading live balls, mixing shots, missing more than they would in a grooving drill, and getting honest feedback with real numbers attached. That discomfort — the slightly-too-hard, error-rich environment — is where durable skill is built. It’s not the coach being disorganized. It’s the coach respecting how learning actually works.
None of this means repetition has no place. A brand-new player learning the basic shape of a swing benefits from some blocked reps just to get the feel. But that phase is short. The moment a player can produce the stroke, the job is to make practice look more like a match, not less. You can read more about how I structure development across skill levels on our coaching page.
After three decades on the court, the lesson that’s stuck with me most is that the practice that feels the best is rarely the practice that works the best. The players who improve the fastest are the ones willing to be a little uncomfortable, miss a few more balls, and trust that the mess is the work. That’s the science, and in my experience, it’s also just true.
If you’re weighing a summer or fall program for your junior and want to talk through what to look for, you can reach me directly at michael@srq.tennis or 941-239-4703. I’m always happy to talk tennis.
— Michael Boothman, USPTA Elite Professional, SRQ Tennis, Sarasota FL