It’s the second week of June, and the courts in Sarasota are already radiating heat by 9 a.m. Summer camp season is in full swing, juniors are logging more court hours than at any other point in the year, and I’m watching the same mistake play out on public courts all over town: kids going from the car to full-speed sprinting drills in under five minutes, in 90-degree heat, with nothing in between.
I’m Michael Boothman, a USPTA Elite Professional with 30+ years of coaching experience and the founder of SRQ Tennis here in Sarasota. Every summer I have some version of this conversation with parents, so this year I’m writing it down. The short version: how hard your child trains in the summer matters far less than the order in which their body is prepared to train. Get the order wrong and you get sloppy footwork, sore joints, and a kid who dreads practice by July. Get it right and summer becomes the biggest development window of the year.
The pillar behind this: Movement & Conditioning in the Right Order
One of the Six Pillars of my coaching philosophy is Movement & Conditioning in the Right Order. It’s the least glamorous pillar and probably the most ignored, because the payoff isn’t visible in a single session. The sequence is simple:
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Joint preparation first. Ankles, hips, shoulders, and spine get moved through their ranges before anything explosive happens. For a 10-year-old this takes about four minutes. It’s not stretching for the sake of stretching - it’s telling the joints what positions they’ll be asked to handle in the next 90 minutes.
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Muscle activation second. Short, low-load movements that wake up the specific muscles tennis depends on: glutes for the first step, calves for split-step landings, the rotational core for every groundstroke. Another four to five minutes.
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High-intensity work last. Only after the first two stages do we sprint, jump, or play full-speed live points. By then the body is ready to move well, which means the footwork patterns being rehearsed are good ones.
Most junior programs run this backward or skip the first two stages entirely. The result isn’t usually a dramatic injury - it’s quieter than that. It’s a player whose split step is a half-beat late all summer because their ankles and calves were never primed, so every ball is reached instead of arrived at. Movement quality is a skill, and like any skill, it gets practiced every session whether you intend to or not. For footwork specifically, I build on the David Bailey Method - teaching the actual contact-move patterns at low intensity first, then loading them inside live ball play once the shapes are sound.
Why does the order matter even more in summer? Because heat raises the cost of everything. A body working in 90-degree humidity is already spending resources on cooling itself. If the warm-up sequence is skipped, the first 20 minutes of practice get spent compensating - and in Florida summer, those are often the only 20 minutes before fatigue changes how a kid moves.
What this looks like on a Sarasota court in June
At our summer sessions, the first 10 minutes follow the same arc every day, and the kids can run it themselves by week two:
- Minutes 0-4: joint circles and controlled range work - ankles, hips, thoracic spine, shoulders. Done in the shade where possible.
- Minutes 4-8: activation - lateral band steps or skater hops, split-step landings, medicine-ball or shadow rotations. Low load, crisp quality.
- Minutes 8-10: build-up movement - progressively faster court coverage patterns, finishing at about 80% speed.
Only then do we go live. And because live rallies are how we train everything else anyway, the conditioning work doesn’t stop at the warm-up - it’s embedded in point play, where the movement actually has to hold up.
The heat itself is a training variable, not just a nuisance
Sarasota summer adds a second layer: managing the heat directly. The USTA’s cooling and hydration guidance is worth every parent’s five minutes - two points from it that I enforce on my courts:
Hydration starts the day before, not at the water break. A junior who shows up already low on fluids cannot drink their way back to normal mid-session. The practical rule I give families: a full water bottle with dinner the night before, another with breakfast, and the bottle comes to the court already half gone.
Shade breaks are scheduled, not earned. In June and July we break every 20-25 minutes regardless of how practice is going. Heat stress accumulates quietly, and young athletes are famously bad at reporting it. Building breaks into the structure removes the guesswork - and frankly, the kids rally better afterward, which means the practice itself improves.
This is also why our summer camp days at Stoneybrook are structured the way they are: the highest-intensity tennis happens in the morning blocks, the early afternoon shifts toward skills, games, and lower-intensity learning, and water and shade are built into the schedule rather than left to chance.
What parents can actually do
You don’t need to run a conditioning program at home. Three things move the needle:
- Protect the night-before. Sleep and evening hydration set up the next day’s session more than anything done at the court.
- Watch the first ten minutes. If your child’s program goes from arrival to full-speed drills with no preparation sequence in summer heat, that’s worth a conversation with the coach.
- Treat fatigue as information. A kid who is uncharacteristically flat in week three of summer doesn’t need a lecture about effort. They usually need a lighter day - and they come back sharper for it.
Summer in Sarasota is a gift for junior development: more court time, more repetition, more live play than any other season. The players who get the most out of it aren’t the ones who grind the hardest in the heat. They’re the ones whose training respects the order their bodies need - joints, then activation, then intensity - every single day.
If you want to see how this fits into the bigger development picture, the coaching page walks through all Six Pillars and how they connect. And if you have a question about summer training, you can reach me directly at michael@srq.tennis or 941-239-4703.
See you on the court.
Michael Boothman is a USPTA Elite Professional and the founder of SRQ Tennis in Sarasota, Florida.