By late June, a lot of Sarasota tennis parents start to wonder whether the summer is actually doing anything. The school-year rush is over, the kids are on court two or three times a week instead of once, and the days blur together. I get the question a lot around this time: is all this court time really moving the needle, or are we just keeping them busy until August?
My answer, after 30-plus years of coaching here in Sarasota, is that the middle weeks of summer are usually when juniors make their biggest jumps — bigger than anything that happens during the packed, distracted school year. I’m Michael Boothman, founder of SRQ Tennis, and I want to walk through why that is, and how to make sure your player actually gets the jump instead of just getting tired.
Skills need consolidation, not just exposure
During the school year, most juniors touch the court once or twice a week. They learn something on Monday, then go five or six days carrying a full backpack of homework, other sports, and screen time before they touch a racket again. By the time they’re back, the thing they learned has half-faded. They spend the first twenty minutes of the next session re-finding it. That’s not a knock on the kids — that’s just how motor learning works. Skills you practice and then leave alone for a week decay before they ever get locked in.
Summer flips that. When a player is on court three or four times a week, the gap between repetitions shrinks. A correction made on Tuesday is still fresh on Thursday. The brain gets to revisit a pattern while it’s still warm, and that’s when it actually consolidates into something the player owns. The USTA’s guidance on youth development makes the same point about frequency mattering more than marathon sessions (USTA youth tennis coaching resources). Short, frequent, focused beats long and occasional almost every time.
So the raw ingredient of a summer jump isn’t intensity. It’s the shorter spacing between quality reps. That’s free — it’s built into the calendar. The question is what you do with it.
Use the frequency to build accuracy, not just swing harder
This is where the first of our Six Pillars at SRQ Tennis comes in: Accuracy Inside Representative Conditions.
The pillar means exactly what it says — we build placement, not just clean-looking technique, and we build it inside live, game-like conditions rather than in a sterile drill. We use what I call the 85/100 Rule: a player should be hitting a target around 85 out of 100 times in a representative rally before we push the pace or add difficulty. A common in-session version is the 8-out-of-10 test — eight balls to a cone-sized target in a live drill before we move on. Accuracy first, then power. Always that order.
Summer is the ideal window for this because you finally have the repetition budget to build accuracy honestly. Accuracy is not a thing you teach in one lesson and check off. It’s a number that climbs slowly as a player stacks successful reps under slightly varied conditions — different spins coming in, different recovery positions, a little fatigue. When a junior is only on court once a week, you never get enough swings at it to move that number. When they’re on four times a week for eight weeks, you can take a forehand that lands in the right third of the court 5 out of 10 times in June and have it at 8 out of 10 by late July. That’s a real, measurable jump — the kind a player feels in a match.
The trap to avoid is using all that extra court time to just hit bigger. More reps of a sloppy, low-accuracy pattern only makes the sloppy pattern more permanent. Frequency is a multiplier. It multiplies whatever you point it at. Point it at placement.
What a productive summer week actually looks like
You don’t need a complicated plan. A junior making a real mid-summer jump usually has a week that looks something like this:
A couple of live-ball sessions where the focus is a single, specific target — not “hit good forehands,” but “land 8 of 10 crosscourt forehands past the service line.” A point-play day where that same shot has to hold up under the pressure of actually competing, because a skill that only works in a cooperative rally isn’t built yet. And enough rest in between that the player shows up fresh rather than dragging. Three quality touches beat five exhausted ones.
Notice what’s not on that list: a brand-new technical project every session. Mid-summer is for consolidating two or three things deeply, not collecting ten things shallowly. If your player’s coach keeps the focus narrow and keeps score on it with real numbers, the summer will do its work. If you want to see how we structure that progression, our coaching page lays out how the Six Pillars build on each other through a player’s development.
For parents: how to tell it’s working
You don’t need to read the strokes. Watch for three signs. First, your player can tell you what they’re working on in one sentence — “I’m trying to get my crosscourt forehand deep.” Vague answers mean the focus is too scattered. Second, there’s a number attached, and it’s moving. “I hit 7 out of 10 today, last week it was 5.” That’s the evidence the confidence is being built on something real. Third, the thing holds up in points, not just in drills. A skill that survives competition is a skill that’s actually been built.
If those three things are happening, your player is in the middle of a jump right now, even if it doesn’t look dramatic day to day. The summer gains in tennis are quiet. They show up all at once in the fall, when the school-year kids who only played once a week are suddenly a step behind.
The middle of summer feels like the slow part. It’s actually the productive part. The frequency is already there — use it to build accuracy you can count, and let the calendar do the rest.
If you’ve got a junior in the Sarasota area and you want to talk through how to make the back half of the summer count, I’m easy to reach. You can read more about my background and approach on the about page, or reach out directly — I answer my own phone.
See you on the court.
— Coach Michael Boothman, USPTA Elite Professional