Most players who come to me in Sarasota think their forehand problem is a power problem. The ball sails long, or it dumps into the net, and the first instinct is to swing harder or add more spin. After more than thirty years on the court, I can tell you the issue is almost never effort. It’s geometry.
I’m Michael Boothman, founder of SRQ Tennis here in Sarasota, and one of the six pillars I build every lesson around is Technique Is Geometry. The idea is simple: where the racquet meets the ball, and what angle the strings are facing at that exact moment, decide where the ball goes. Everything else — the grip, the backswing, the follow-through — exists to put those two things in the right place. If you fix the contact, you fix the shot. If you only fix the choreography, you get a swing that looks nice and still misses.
This post breaks down the two laws that sit underneath that pillar, and a drill you can run this week to feel them.
The Two Laws of Ball-Striking
When I watch a junior strike a ball, I’m only looking for two things at contact.
Law one: center contact. The ball should meet the middle of the string bed. Off-center contact twists the racquet head in your hand, drains energy, and sends the ball off-line in ways you can’t predict. A ball struck two inches toward the frame can leave the strings on a completely different path than the same swing with clean center contact. Power that comes from a clean center hit is free — you don’t have to muscle it.
Law two: square face. At the moment of contact, the string face should be vertical — pointing at your target, not tilted open toward the sky or closed toward the ground. A face that’s open by even a few degrees turns a good swing into a ball that floats long. A closed face buries it in the net. The swing path adds spin and shape, but the face angle at contact sets the starting direction.
That’s it. Center contact and a square face. I coach the contact, not the choreography, because a player can have a textbook-looking swing and still break both laws — and a player with an unusual-looking swing can obey both laws perfectly and hit a clean, repeatable ball. The strings meeting the ball is where the truth lives.
Why geometry beats “feel”
Telling a ten-year-old to “feel the ball more” gives them nothing to act on. Geometry gives them a target. When I say “catch the ball in the center and show your strings to the fence,” that’s a physical instruction they can check, rep after rep. It also lines up with how motor skills actually get learned. The research on skill acquisition is consistent on this point: learners improve fastest when they get clear, external cues about the outcome of a movement rather than vague internal feelings. The USTA’s player development resources lean the same direction, emphasizing measurable, repeatable fundamentals over copying a pro’s style. You can read more about that approach at USTA Player Development.
Feel still matters — but feel is what you earn after the geometry is reliable, not the thing you start with. Build the shape first. The feel shows up on its own.
A drill you can run this week: “Square to the Fence”
Here’s a live-ball drill I use with my Sarasota juniors at Potter Park. It isolates both laws without turning into a mechanical, fed-ball grind. Live ball is how we train, because real rallies are the only place these laws have to hold up under pressure.
Setup. Player at the baseline, coach or hitting partner feeding live from across the net at a comfortable, rally-able pace. Place a target — a cone or a towel — about three feet inside the baseline on the deep crosscourt corner.
The rep. Player hits forehands with one job: clean center contact, square face, aiming to land the ball near the target. We’re not chasing pace. We’re chasing the geometry.
The score. Count out of ten. We’re looking for eight clean strikes that land in the target zone before we add anything — more pace, more height, a moving target. This is the 85/100 rule in action: get the fundamental reliable inside a live, game-like condition before you make it harder. Confidence is built on evidence, and “eight out of ten to the cone” is evidence a player can hold onto.
The cue. If the ball floats long, the face was open — show the strings to the target a hair later in the swing. If it nets, the face was closed or the contact dropped below center. I keep the feedback to those two checkpoints. Nothing about the elbow, nothing about the hips, unless those are what’s actually breaking the contact.
Run three sets of ten. Track the number each set. By the third set most players have cleaned up the face angle without ever thinking about their swing — because they were thinking about where the strings met the ball instead.
What this looks like over a season
A junior who internalizes the two laws stops treating misses as mysteries. A ball goes long, and instead of getting frustrated, they think face was open and adjust the next one. That’s a player who can self-correct, which is the whole point. My job is to make myself unnecessary in the moment — to give a player a framework so clear they can coach their own contact between points.
That’s also why I keep the language consistent across every age group I work with in Sarasota, from the youngest beginners at Potter Park up through tournament players. Same two laws. Same checkpoints. The drills get harder and the targets get smaller, but center contact and a square face never stop being the foundation. You can see how the rest of the system fits together on the coaching page.
If your child is swinging hard and still spraying balls, don’t add effort. Check the geometry. Eight out of ten clean strikes to a target will do more for their game than a month of swinging for the fences.
Want to talk through where your player is? Reach me directly at 941-239-4703 or michael@srq.tennis. I answer my own phone.
— Coach Michael Boothman