Walk past any junior tennis court in Sarasota and you will hear it within five minutes: a kid misses a forehand, drops their shoulders, and an adult calls out, “You’ve got this! Believe in yourself!”
The kid does not feel more confident. They feel watched.
I’m Michael Boothman, a USPTA Elite Professional and the founder of SRQ Tennis here in Sarasota. After 30-plus years of coaching juniors, I can tell you that the relationship between praise and confidence is one of the most misunderstood parts of player development. Parents and coaches hand out encouragement like it’s fuel, and then wonder why the tank stays empty. The reason is simple: confidence doesn’t come from being told you’re good. It comes from evidence that you’re improving.
The pillar: Confidence Is Built, Not Given
One of the Six Pillars that shapes everything we do at SRQ Tennis is called Confidence Is Built, Not Given. The idea is that real self-belief is constructed from proof — specific, countable proof that a player can see with their own eyes.
This isn’t a motivational slogan. It lines up with one of the most replicated findings in psychology. Albert Bandura’s research on self-efficacy showed that the strongest source of a person’s belief in their own ability is what he called mastery experiences — actually doing the thing, succeeding at it, and knowing the success was earned. Verbal persuasion (“you’ve got this!”) ranked among the weakest sources. You can read the original framework in Bandura’s 1977 paper on self-efficacy, and nearly fifty years of follow-up research has held the ranking steady.
For a 10-year-old on a tennis court, that means a coach’s job is not to supply belief. It’s to engineer situations where the player generates their own.
What evidence looks like on a real court
Here’s how this works in practice at our Sarasota programs.
Say a junior is working on directing the forehand crosscourt. Instead of “good job, that one looked better,” the player gets a number: today you hit 5 out of 10 past the service line into the crosscourt zone in a live rally. We write it down. Next week the number is 6 out of 10. The week after, 8.
Nobody has to convince that player they’re improving. The chart does it. And here’s the part most adults underestimate: a kid who has watched themselves go from 5 to 8 responds completely differently to a bad day than a kid who has only been told they’re talented. The first kid sees a dip in a rising line. The second kid sees evidence that the adults were lying.
A few rules make this work:
- Count things that are real. Targets hit in live rallies, first-serve percentage in practice sets, rally lengths sustained. Not vague impressions.
- Track over weeks, not minutes. A single session proves nothing. Six weeks of numbers proves something a child can lean on.
- Let the player own the numbers. Our juniors know their own counts. The data belongs to them, not to a clipboard the coach hides.
- Set the bar where success is earned but reachable. If a drill produces 2 out of 10, the task is too hard and the evidence says “you can’t.” If it produces 10 out of 10, the task is too easy and the evidence says nothing. The useful zone is in between — challenged, but succeeding more often than failing.
That last point is where coaching skill actually lives. Anyone can run a drill. Calibrating a drill so a specific 9-year-old succeeds roughly 7 times out of 10 — that’s the craft.
Why empty praise backfires
I want to be fair to the parents shouting encouragement from the fence: it comes from love, and it’s better than criticism. But unearned praise carries a hidden cost.
Kids are excellent lie detectors. When a child shanks three balls and hears “great job!”, they learn one of two things. Either the adult isn’t really watching, or the adult thinks the truth is too discouraging to say out loud. Both conclusions quietly erode trust — and worse, they teach the child that their actual performance is something to be papered over rather than worked on.
Contrast that with a coach who says: “That was 4 out of 10. Last month you were at 2. Let’s see if we can get 5 before we finish.” No inflation, no rescue, no judgment. Just a trajectory. Kids relax inside that kind of honesty because nothing is being hidden from them.
This is also why we keep our groups small — six players maximum — so every player’s numbers actually get counted. You can’t build evidence-based confidence for twelve kids on one court. The math doesn’t work, so most programs quietly stop counting and go back to “looking good out there!”
What parents can do this week
You don’t need a coaching certification to apply this at home. Three suggestions:
Replace “you’re so good at tennis” with questions about evidence. Try “what number did you hit today?” or “what’s something you can do now that you couldn’t do a month ago?” You’re training your child to locate their confidence in facts they own.
Praise the trajectory, not the talent. “You’ve been at this serve for three weeks and it’s clearly better” beats “you’re a natural server” every time. Talent-praise makes mistakes feel like identity threats. Trajectory-praise makes mistakes feel like data.
Resist rescuing the bad days. When your child comes off the court frustrated, the urge is to immediately repair the mood. Instead, let the season’s evidence do the repairing: “Rough one today. Where were you on this six weeks ago?” That’s a question a kid can answer with proof.
Confidence built this way is slower than the shouted kind. It’s also the only kind that survives a 4-5 third-set tiebreaker, because it was never borrowed from an adult in the first place — it was earned, one counted ball at a time.
If you want to see how we structure this evidence-first approach across our junior programs at Potter Park and Pineview, the details are on the coaching page. And if you’d rather just talk it through, reach out — I answer my own messages.
See you on the court,
Coach Michael