Every June I get the same question from a parent at one of our Sarasota courts: “If my kid practiced for three hours straight on Saturday instead of an hour on three different days, wouldn’t that add up to the same thing?” It’s a fair question. The math says yes. The brain says no.
I’m Michael Boothman, and after thirty-plus years of coaching here in Sarasota, I’ve watched the same pattern repeat itself: the players who improve fastest aren’t the ones who grind the longest. They’re the ones who practice in shorter, more frequent doses. Researchers call this the spacing effect, and it’s one of the most consistent findings in the science of how people learn motor skills. It also happens to be one of the most ignored.
What the spacing effect actually means
The spacing effect is simple to state: the same amount of practice produces more durable learning when it’s spread out over time instead of packed into one block. Three thirty-minute sessions across a week beat one ninety-minute session on Saturday, even though the total practice time is identical.
This isn’t a tennis-specific quirk. It shows up across skill domains, and it’s been studied for over a century. A good entry point if you want to read the underlying science is the American Psychological Association’s overview of distributed practice research. The short version: your brain consolidates a skill in the hours and days between practice sessions, not just during them. When you cram, you skip the consolidation. When you space, you bank it.
For a junior tennis player, this means the gap between Tuesday and Thursday isn’t dead time. It’s part of the training. The forehand pattern a player drilled on Tuesday is quietly getting wired in while they sleep, go to school, and forget about tennis entirely. By Thursday they come back a little better than they left — and the next session builds on that small gain instead of starting cold.
Why long sessions feel productive but aren’t
Here’s the trap. A long Saturday session feels like it’s working. By the end of two hours, the player is hitting the ball cleaner than they did at the start. Parents see it. Players feel it. Everyone goes home satisfied.
But most of that within-session improvement is temporary. It’s the player warming up, grooving a rhythm, and riding short-term feel. Come back a week later with no practice in between and a lot of it has evaporated. We mistake the warm-up bump for real learning. It isn’t.
Spacing flips this. You give up some of that satisfying end-of-session polish in exchange for something more valuable: a skill that actually shows up the next time it matters. Less impressive on Saturday, more reliable on match day.
How this connects to Confidence Is Built, Not Given
At SRQ Tennis, the pillar I lean on most here is Confidence Is Built, Not Given. We don’t tell a player they’re improving — we show them, with numbers. A player who hits eight out of ten forehands to a target in a live drill has evidence. They don’t need me to manufacture belief.
The spacing effect and that pillar fit together perfectly. When practice is spaced, the numbers tell a cleaner story. A player who tracks their target-hit count across short Tuesday and Thursday sessions watches the line climb week over week, and that climb is real because it survived the gap. A player who only ever hits in one long weekend block sees inflated numbers at the end of each session and confusing drops at the start of the next. Spaced practice gives confidence something honest to stand on.
What this looks like for a Sarasota junior
You don’t need a complicated schedule to use this. A few practical moves:
Trade length for frequency. If you can only get your child on court a fixed number of hours per week, break those hours into more days, not fewer. Two forty-five-minute sessions beat one ninety-minute marathon almost every time.
Use the off days on purpose. A ten-minute wall session or a basket of serves in the driveway between formal practices keeps the skill warm without exhausting it. Short and frequent is the whole point.
Don’t judge a session by its peak. The best rep of the day at the end of a long block tells you very little. What matters is where the player starts the next session. That starting point is the real measure of learning.
Track one number across sessions. Pick a single target — first serves in, backhands past the service line, whatever fits the player’s stage — and write it down each day. Watch the trend across weeks, not the high point within a day.
The summer angle
This matters even more right now. Summer in Sarasota tempts everyone toward the marathon model — long camp days, big blocks of court time while school’s out. There’s nothing wrong with a full camp day; the variety and match play are genuinely valuable. But if your child is doing extra work on top of that, resist the urge to stack it all into one heroic session. Sprinkle it in. Twenty minutes here, thirty minutes there. The spacing does the heavy lifting.
I’ve coached players who improved more from fifteen focused minutes three mornings a week than from the two-hour weekend sessions their friends were grinding through. It’s not about working less. It’s about respecting how the brain actually files away a skill.
If you want to see how we build this kind of structure into our programs, take a look at how we approach coaching at SRQ Tennis. The thread running through all of it is the same: do the work in the order and the doses the science supports, measure it honestly, and let the evidence build the confidence.
Cramming feels like progress. Spacing is progress. The difference shows up where it counts — not at the end of Saturday’s session, but at the start of the next one.
— Coach Michael