Most parents can tell when their kid is having fun on a tennis court. Far fewer can tell whether their kid is actually getting better. Those are two different questions, and after thirty-plus years of coaching juniors here in Sarasota, I’ve learned that the gap between them is where a lot of family money and a lot of kid frustration quietly disappears.
I’m Michael Boothman, founder of SRQ Tennis, and this is the question I get most often from parents at Potter Park and Pineview: “Is she improving?” It’s a fair question, and it deserves a better answer than “Yeah, looking good out there.” So here’s how I’d teach any parent to read real progress — without needing to know a thing about tennis technique.
Pretty strokes are not the same as progress
Here’s the trap. A kid who hits a hundred fed balls from a coach standing five feet away will start to look smooth. Clean follow-through, nice and relaxed, ball after ball over the net. A parent watching from the fence sees that and thinks: progress. Then the child plays an actual point in a match and the smooth stroke vanishes. The ball is moving, the spacing is wrong, the feet are late, and suddenly it looks like they’ve never played before.
That gap is the single most common reason juniors plateau. The stroke was never the problem. The problem was that the stroke only existed in conditions that never show up in a real match.
This is the heart of the first of our six coaching pillars at SRQ Tennis — Accuracy Inside Representative Conditions. The idea is simple but it changes everything: a skill only counts if a player can produce it inside live, game-like conditions, not on a feeding cart. Placement built against a moving, unpredictable ball is real. Placement built against a coach gently spoon-feeding the same ball to the same spot is a magic trick that disappears under pressure.
So the first thing I’d tell any parent: stop watching how the stroke looks and start watching what happens when the ball is genuinely live.
What real progress actually looks like from the fence
You don’t need a coaching license to spot the markers. Here’s what I’d watch for over a four-to-six-week stretch.
They recover after a bad shot faster than they used to. Early on, one mistake wrecks the next three points. A developing player shortens that recovery — miss, reset, ready for the next ball. That’s a real, trackable skill, and it’s a better sign than any single pretty winner.
They get to more balls. Not “hits harder” — gets there. Improved movement shows up as a kid arriving at the ball balanced and on time instead of lunging at the last second. If your child is reaching shots in June that they were waving at in April, that’s development you can see.
They can tell you a number. This is the big one. Ask your kid: “How many of your forehands landed where you wanted today?” A player who’s actually developing inside a good system can answer that, because they’ve been counting. We use what we call the 85/100 Rule — a player should be hitting a target at a high, consistent rate inside a live drill before we ask them to add pace or push to the next challenge. When a child can tell you “eight out of ten crosscourt today, last week it was six,” you are looking at evidence, not vibes.
That last point matters because confidence in a junior should be built on real numbers, not on a coach telling them they’re great. Kids know when praise is hollow. They believe progress they can count.
Questions worth asking a Sarasota program
If you’re evaluating a program — ours or anyone’s — here are the questions that cut through the marketing.
“How much of my child’s court time is spent in live rallies versus hitting fed balls?” Live ball should dominate. Fed balls have a place for grooving a brand-new motion, but a junior who spends most of the hour catching spoon-fed balls is being entertained, not developed.
“How will I know if my child is improving — what do you actually measure?” A good answer involves specifics: targets hit, rally length, recovery, movement. A vague answer (“we focus on fundamentals and fun”) tells you they’re not tracking anything, which means neither are you.
“How many kids are on the court at once?” This isn’t a small detail. We cap groups at six players because beyond that, the math of court time and individual attention simply stops working — a child can’t get enough live reps to develop if they’re standing in a line of twelve. The USTA’s junior development guidance emphasizes maximizing meaningful ball-striking repetitions for young players, and you can explore age-appropriate development resources at USTA’s tennis tool center.
The honest part
Real progress is slower and less photogenic than the highlight-reel version. A kid grinding through live points, missing some, resetting, counting their targets, getting to one more ball each week — that doesn’t make for a flashy video. But it’s the thing that holds up when the score actually matters.
If you want to go deeper on how we structure development around live, measurable skill-building, our coaching philosophy page lays out all six pillars and how they fit together across a season.
And if you’re ever standing at the fence at Potter Park wondering whether what you’re watching is real progress, the test is simple. Ask your kid for a number. If they can give you one, and that number is moving in the right direction, you’re in good hands — whoever the coach is.
See you on the court, Michael Boothman SRQ Tennis, Sarasota