Summer in Sarasota is tournament season. The school year is over, the courts at Payne Park and the surrounding clubs fill up with juniors chasing match play, and a lot of families find themselves driving across the county — and sometimes across the state — for weekend events. It’s an exciting stretch. It can also be a confusing one, because it’s easy to measure the whole summer by a column of wins and losses and miss what actually matters: whether your player is getting better.
I’m Michael Boothman, a USPTA Elite Professional and the founder of SRQ Tennis here in Sarasota. After thirty-plus years of coaching, I’ve watched a lot of juniors pour an entire summer into competing and come out the other side either sharper and more confident — or just tired and discouraged. The difference almost never comes down to talent. It comes down to how the player and the family decided to use the matches. So before the calendar fills up, here’s how I’d think about summer tournament season if your junior is playing in or around Sarasota this year.
A tournament is the most representative condition there is
One of the Six Pillars I coach by is Accuracy Inside Representative Conditions. The idea is simple but it gets ignored constantly: the skills you build in practice only transfer if the practice looks and feels like the situation you’re trying to perform in. A forehand you can hit eight out of ten times to a target while standing still and feeding yourself a ball is a different skill than a forehand you can hit eight out of ten times when you’re down a break, your legs are heavy, and the kid across the net just ripped a winner past you.
That’s exactly why tournaments matter so much for development. A match is the single most representative condition a junior will ever train in. Nothing you set up on a practice court — no drill, no point-play game, no pressure simulation — fully reproduces the nerves, the consequences, and the problem-solving of a real match against a stranger who wants to beat you. So summer tournament season isn’t a break from training. Handled well, it is training, and it’s the most honest feedback your player will get all year.
The catch is that feedback is only useful if you actually collect it.
Win or lose, leave with two pieces of information
Here’s the shift I ask families to make. After every match, win or lose, your player should be able to answer two questions: What worked today, and what broke down under pressure?
That’s it. Not “did I win” — the scoreboard already told you that. The useful information is more specific. Did the second serve hold up when it mattered, or did it get short and sit up at 30-all? Did your player keep playing their patterns when they got tight, or did they shrink and just push the ball back? Did they get a read on the opponent’s weaker wing by the second set, or did they play the whole match without ever testing it?
When a player walks off the court with two clear pieces of information like that, a loss stops being a verdict and starts being a to-do list. We bring those notes back to the practice court, build representative drills around them, and the next tournament becomes a chance to check whether the fix took. Confidence gets built on that kind of evidence — real, specific, observable progress — not on a trophy. A junior who loses in the second round but figures out that their backhand return falls apart on big points has learned something they can train. A junior who wins the whole thing without noticing anything has learned almost nothing.
How to pick events that actually develop your player
Not every tournament serves the same purpose, and one of the most common mistakes I see Sarasota families make is signing up for events that are either way over their player’s head or far below it. Both waste a weekend.
A useful rule of thumb: your junior should be losing some matches and winning some matches across a summer of events. If they’re getting bageled every weekend, the level is too high — they’re not getting reps in competitive points, they’re just getting overwhelmed, and that’s how kids start to dread tournaments. If they’re winning every event without ever facing a real test, they’re not being asked to solve anything, and the matches stop being representative of the higher tier they’re trying to reach. The sweet spot is events where they’re genuinely challenged but still get to play meaningful points deep into matches.
The USTA’s competition pathway is built around this idea of matching players to appropriate levels, and it’s worth understanding before you fill out a summer schedule. You can read how they structure junior competition and ratings on the USTA’s official junior tournaments page. For local families, mixing a couple of lower-stakes events early in the summer with one or two stretch events later — once your player has some match reps and some specific things they’ve been working on — tends to produce the best development arc.
The parents’ job during tournament season
If you’re a parent reading this, the most valuable thing you can do during a summer of tournaments is protect the learning, not manage the outcome. That means resisting the urge to coach from the fence on every point, and it especially means being careful about the drive home. A junior who just lost a tough one does not need a play-by-play breakdown in the car — they need a little space, and then, later, a calm conversation about those two questions: what worked, and what broke down. The match already delivered the hard feedback. Your job is to help them be able to look at it without flinching.
It also helps to keep the whole summer in perspective. One bad tournament in June tells you very little. A pattern across six events tells you a lot. Keep a light log if you can — even just a note on your phone after each event — and you’ll start to see the real trends instead of riding the emotional wave of each individual result.
Make the summer count
Sarasota gives juniors a real gift in the summer: warm weather, plenty of courts, and a steady stream of events within a short drive. The families who get the most out of it aren’t the ones chasing the most trophies. They’re the ones treating every match as the most representative training condition their player will ever get, and walking off each court with something specific to work on.
If you’d like help building a summer that develops your player instead of just exhausting them, that’s exactly the kind of planning I do with the families I coach — you can read more about how I approach junior development on my coaching page. Pick the right events, ask the right two questions after each one, and by August your player won’t just have a record. They’ll have a list of things they got better at — and the evidence to prove it.
— Coach Michael