People assume the hardest part of coaching tennis is teaching the strokes. After more than 30 years on courts around Sarasota, I can tell you it isn’t. The forehand, the serve, the split step — those are learnable. The hard part is patience. Not the polite kind where you smile and wait. The real kind, where you hold your nerve while a ten-year-old misses the same shot forty times before it finally clicks on the forty-first.
I’m Michael Boothman, and I founded SRQ Tennis here in Sarasota after a long stretch of coaching every kind of player you can imagine — kids who’d never held a racket, teenagers chasing college spots, adults rebuilding a game they’d let go for twenty years. If there’s one thing all those years gave me, it’s a different relationship with time. Early in my career I wanted results by Friday. Now I measure progress in weeks and months, and I’ve learned that’s not a compromise. It’s how skill actually gets built.
Why patience and good coaching are the same thing
Here’s the part most people miss: patience isn’t passive. It’s a method. When a young player struggles with a backhand, the impatient instinct is to pile on cues — bend your knees, turn your shoulders, follow through, watch the ball — until the kid is so busy thinking they can’t move. I’ve done it. Most coaches have. It feels like teaching. It’s actually noise.
The patient version is quieter and harder. You pick one thing. You let the player rep it inside a real rally until their body sorts it out. You resist the urge to fix everything at once. Motor learning research has been clear on this for decades: skills consolidate through repetition with feedback over time, not through a flood of instructions in a single afternoon. The United States Tennis Association’s own player development guidance leans the same direction — meaningful, game-based reps beat drilling in isolation (USTA Player Development).
That’s also why one of our Six Pillars at SRQ Tennis is Confidence Is Built, Not Given. You can’t hand a kid confidence with a pep talk. They see through it. What works is evidence — actual proof they can point to. When a player hits 8 out of 10 forehands to a target in a live drill, that number is theirs. Nobody gave it to them. They earned it, and they know it. The next time they’re nervous in a match, they don’t need me cheering from the fence. They’ve got a memory of doing the thing under pressure. That memory is worth more than any amount of “you’ve got this.”
The forty-first ball
I think about a player I worked with a few summers back. Bright kid, quick feet, and a two-handed backhand that fell apart every time the ball came a little higher than his comfort zone. For three weeks it barely moved. He’d get frustrated, I’d see his shoulders drop, and the impatient coach in me wanted to overhaul the whole stroke.
Instead we kept it small. One adjustment to his contact point. Same live rally drill, every session, tracking how many clean balls he hit in a row. Week one, his best was three. Week two, six. By the end of week four he strung together fourteen, and the look on his face when he hit number fourteen told me everything. He didn’t need me to say he’d improved. The count said it for him.
If I’d panicked in week one and rebuilt everything, I’d have wiped out the small gain that was quietly forming underneath the frustration. Patience isn’t waiting and hoping. It’s trusting the process you put in place and giving it room to work.
What this looks like for parents
Sarasota parents ask me all the time why their kid isn’t progressing faster. It’s a fair question — lessons cost money and time, and you want to see something for it. My honest answer is usually: they probably are progressing, just not on the timeline you’re picturing.
Real skill development is lumpy. A player can look stuck for three weeks and then jump noticeably in a single session, because the work was accumulating the whole time even when the scoreboard wasn’t moving. The danger is bailing during a flat stretch and switching approaches right before the gain shows up. I’ve watched families chase quick fixes from program to program and wonder why nothing sticks. Usually nothing was wrong — they just kept pulling the plant up to check the roots.
The most useful thing a parent can do is track something concrete and boring. How many serves landed in. How many rally balls in a row. Not because the number is the point, but because it keeps everyone honest about whether progress is actually happening, instead of relying on a gut feeling that swings with every good or bad day.
What patience gave back to me
Thirty years in, the patience I learned on the court changed how I coach and, frankly, how I deal with my own kids and the slow grind of running a small business in Sarasota. Things worth building take longer than you want. The work compounds quietly. You rarely get to see the exact moment something clicks — you just keep showing up, keep the inputs honest, and trust that reps plus time do what they’ve always done.
That’s the whole job, really. Pick the right thing to work on. Give it real reps inside live play. Track it so the progress is undeniable. And then have the patience to let a kid miss forty balls so that, on the forty-first, the confidence they walk away with is something nobody handed them.
If you want to see how we put this into practice with juniors across Sarasota, take a look at more about how I coach. And if your young player is stuck in one of those flat stretches right now, hang in there. The forty-first ball is usually closer than it feels.
See you on the court, Michael Boothman