Ask most juniors what makes a good serve and they will tell you the same thing: hit it hard. Watch them on a Sarasota court for ten minutes and you will see the cost of that belief — first serves that miss long, second serves that float in fearfully, and a kid who has no idea where the ball is actually going. The speed is there. The control is not.
I am Michael Boothman, and after thirty-plus years coaching here in Sarasota, I have come to treat the serve the same way I treat every other shot: placement is the skill worth building first, and power is what gets added on top of placement once it is reliable. That is the heart of the first of our Six Pillars — Accuracy Inside Representative Conditions. It means we do not chase accuracy in some sterile, stand-still drill that has nothing to do with a real point. We build it inside conditions that look and feel like the match the player will actually have to serve in. This post breaks down one specific drill I run with junior players, why it works, and how a parent can set up a simplified version at home or at a public court.
Why “just hit it harder” backfires
When a player serves for raw speed before they own their placement, two things happen. First, the contact point drifts. Chasing pace pulls the toss forward and the shoulder out of position, and the margin for error shrinks fast. Second — and this is the one that quietly ruins matches — the player stops trusting the second serve. If you cannot place a ball, you cannot take anything off it and still land it where you want, so the second serve becomes a nervous push. A nervous second serve loses more points over a junior career than a slow first serve ever will.
The research on skill acquisition backs this up. Motor learning studies consistently show that practice which forces a player to solve a real targeting problem transfers to competition far better than repetitive, low-context repetition. The USTA’s own player development materials emphasize building serve mechanics around consistency and placement targets before maximizing velocity. You can read more about their developmental approach in the USTA’s coaching and player development resources. The short version: a serve you can aim is a serve you can build on. A serve you can only swing at is a dead end.
The 85/100 Rule
Before the drill, the standard. I use what we call the 85/100 Rule: a skill is not “owned” until the player can produce it successfully 85 times out of 100 attempts inside game-like conditions. Not on a good day. Not when the coach is feeding softly. Eighty-five out of a hundred, repeatably, with a target and a consequence.
That number does two jobs. It gives the player an honest mirror — they cannot fool themselves into thinking a shot is solid when the evidence says otherwise — and it gives us a clear graduation point. When a junior hits the 85/100 mark on placement, that is when we start adding pace. Not before. This connects directly to another of our pillars, Confidence Is Built, Not Given: the player’s belief in their serve comes from the scoreboard of their own reps, not from me telling them they look great.
The drill: Four-Box Serve Targets
Here is the version I run with Sarasota juniors who are past the basics of the motion and ready to build location.
Setup. Take one service box. Place four targets inside it — I use flat cones or even folded towels so a missed serve does not bounce wildly. Position one target wide (out toward the sideline), one down the T (toward the center line), one into the body (middle of the box), and one as a deep target near the service line. Number them one through four.
The reps. The player serves ten balls. Before each serve, I call a number. They have to serve to that box. We are not counting how hard the ball came off the racket — we are counting whether it landed in the correct zone. A serve that lands in the box but in the wrong zone does not count. This is the “representative” part: in a real match the player has to serve to a specific spot for a reason — away from a forehand, into a weak backhand, jamming a returner who stands too close. Calling the target out loud forces that same decision-making.
The standard. We track the number out of ten, then build toward the 85/100 across sessions. A player who serves 6/10 today and 7/10 next week is showing me real, measurable progress — and that is the kind of evidence I want them to see for themselves.
The progression. Once placement is reliable at a comfortable pace, and only then, we keep the targets and start asking for more speed on the first serve while holding the same accuracy standard. The targets never leave. Power gets layered onto a skill that already works, which is the whole point.
What a parent can do without a coach
You do not need me on the court to start this. If you have a bucket of balls and access to a Sarasota public court — Potter Park and the courts around Pineview both work well — you can set up two or three targets in a service box and play the “call the number” game with your junior. Keep it light. Let them track their own score. Resist the urge to coach the motion mid-drill; just call targets and let them solve the problem. Counting honestly is the lesson. If you want a sense of how this fits into the larger development picture, our coaching philosophy page lays out how accuracy, live-ball training, and progress tracking connect across every part of a player’s game.
One caution: this drill is about location, not about fixing a broken motion. If a player’s serve mechanics are genuinely unsafe or stuck, target work alone will not solve it, and that is worth a few sessions with a qualified coach. But for the large group of juniors who can already get the ball in and simply have no control over where — which is most of them — the Four-Box drill turns a vague “serve better” into a number they can chase.
The bigger idea
Accuracy first is not a slogan, it is an order of operations. We build placement inside conditions that resemble the match, we hold a real standard, and we let the player watch their own numbers climb. Power is not ignored — it is earned. That sequence is why a Sarasota junior who trains this way ends up with a second serve they trust under pressure, which is the serve that actually wins matches.
If you have a junior in Sarasota who can hit the ball but cannot place it, start with the targets. Give it three or four sessions, keep the scoring honest, and watch the second serve stop being something they are afraid of.
— Michael Boothman, USPTA Elite Professional, Sarasota FL