Summer is the longest uninterrupted block of practice time a junior tennis player gets all year. School is out, the courts are open early, and for two and a half months a young player can build habits that hold up through the fall season. The catch is that summer in this part of Florida is also when families lose the most time to heat, vacations, and well-intentioned but unfocused hitting. I’m Michael Boothman, founder of SRQ Tennis here in Sarasota, and after thirty years of coaching I’ve watched plenty of summers either move a player forward or quietly stall them. The difference usually comes down to a few simple decisions families make in June.
This guide is for parents in Lakewood Ranch, greater Sarasota, and the surrounding neighborhoods who want their kids to come out of summer better than they went in — without turning tennis into a grind.
Where to play around Lakewood Ranch and Sarasota
The biggest advantage of growing up in this area is that you don’t need an expensive club membership to develop. Public and community courts are everywhere, and most of them sit empty in the early morning hours that summer practically demands.
In the Lakewood Ranch area, families have access to community courts through several neighborhood associations, plus public options a short drive west. Closer to the city, Sarasota’s public parks — including the courts I run programs out of at Potter Park — give juniors plenty of room to rally without a reservation fee. Siesta Key and the Pineview area round out the options for families on the south and west sides of town.
My honest advice: pick the two closest courts to your house and rotate between them. The court a kid will actually use in July is the one that’s a five-minute drive away, not the perfect surface across town that nobody wants to fight traffic to reach.
Beat the heat by moving practice to the morning
Sarasota in summer is not a place to practice at 2 p.m. Surface temperatures on a hard court can climb well past anything that’s safe for a child to train on, and heat-related illness is a real risk, not a theoretical one. The U.S. Tennis Association publishes practical guidance on hydration and heat safety for junior players that’s worth a read before the season gets going (USTA player health and safety resources).
The simplest fix is scheduling. We start our summer camp sessions in the morning for exactly this reason. A 60- to 90-minute block between 8 and 10 a.m. is worth more than two hours in the afternoon heat, both for safety and for the quality of the work. A player who’s overheating stops learning — the focus goes, the footwork gets lazy, and the session turns into survival rather than development.
Make the practice actually count: the 85/100 Rule
Here’s where most summer hitting goes wrong. A parent feeds a bucket of balls, the kid grooves a pretty-looking forehand off a predictable feed, and everyone feels productive. Then the player gets into a real rally in the fall and the shot falls apart. The skill never transferred because it was never built under the conditions it had to perform in.
This is the heart of the first of our Six Pillars at SRQ Tennis — Accuracy Inside Representative Conditions. The idea is straightforward: accuracy should be built inside live, game-like situations, not off a static feed. We hold players to what we call the 85/100 Rule — can you hit a target eight or nine times out of ten inside a live drill, not just off a cooperative feed from a coach. A ball machine or a hand-fed bucket can warm a player up, but it can’t teach them to read an incoming ball, adjust their footwork, and still find the target. Only a live rally does that.
For a summer at home, that means less standing and feeding, more rallying with a purpose. Set a simple target — a cone, a towel, a section of the court — and play cooperative rallies where the goal is to land balls in that zone while the ball is genuinely moving. Keep score of it. “How many in a row can we land crosscourt past the service line?” is a better summer drill than a hundred fed forehands, because it forces the player to solve a real problem the way a match will.
Three weekly anchors that hold a summer together
Families always ask me how much is enough. You don’t need a professional academy schedule. Three anchors a week will keep a player progressing:
- One technical session — focused work on one piece of the game, ideally with a coach who can give specific feedback. Pick a single thing to improve, not five.
- One competitive session — live points, sets, or match play against a peer. This is where the technical work gets tested and where confidence actually gets built, because the player sees the evidence in real points.
- One movement and fun session — footwork games, agility, or just a relaxed hit that keeps the love of the game alive. Burnout is the quiet killer of junior tennis, and summer is when it usually starts.
That’s it. Three quality sessions beat six rushed ones every time. If your family is traveling for part of the summer, a racket and a wall in a driveway counts — the consistency of touching the ball matters more than the venue.
What to look for in a summer program
If you’re choosing a camp or clinic rather than running things yourself, a few honest questions will tell you most of what you need to know. Ask how many players are on a court with one coach — small groups mean real reps and real attention, and we cap ours at six for that reason. Ask whether the players spend their time in live rallies or waiting in line for a feed. Ask how the program handles the heat. And ask whether they track anything — a program that can tell you what your child improved with actual numbers is paying attention to development, not just running out the clock.
You can read more about how we structure our junior development work on the SRQ Tennis coaching page, and I’m always happy to talk through what a given summer should look like for a specific kid.
The long view
A single summer won’t make or break a young player. But a well-spent one builds the habits — morning practice, purposeful rallying, competing without fear of mistakes — that compound over years. The families I’ve watched develop strong juniors here in Sarasota and Lakewood Ranch weren’t the ones who trained the most hours. They were the ones who trained the right hours, on courts close to home, in the cool part of the day, with a clear reason for every session.
Pick your two courts. Get out there before the heat. Give every practice a target. That’s a summer worth having.
If you want help mapping out a summer plan for your junior, reach out anytime — michael@srq.tennis or 941-239-4703. See you on the court.
— Coach Michael