There is a moment that happens on a Sarasota court at least once a week. A kid misses an easy ball, the racket comes down, the face goes red, and the next three points get thrown away in a fog of anger. I have watched it for thirty years. I am Michael Boothman, founder of SRQ Tennis, and I will tell you something I did not understand when I started coaching: that fire is not the problem. What you do with it is the whole game.
For a long time I treated frustration like a weed. Pull it out. Tell the kid to calm down, settle down, relax. It almost never worked, and now I understand why. You cannot talk someone out of feeling something. And honestly, I am not sure I want to. The kids who care enough to get angry are usually the kids who care enough to get good.
The pillar that took me the longest to learn
One of the six pillars I coach by is called Channel the Fire. The idea is simple to say and hard to live: competitive frustration is fuel, not a flaw. The job is not to suppress it. The job is to give it somewhere to go. When a young player melts down, the energy is real and it is already there. We are just deciding whether it burns the next point or powers it.
I did not arrive at this through a textbook. I arrived at it through being both a coach and a father. My own kids are competitive. They get frustrated at homework, at video games, at each other, and yes, when they pick up a racket. The first instinct of any parent is to smooth it over. But I started noticing that the smoothing-over taught them nothing. What helped was naming the feeling, then handing them a small, concrete next step. Reset your strings. Walk to the back fence. Breathe out slow. Pick a target and hit it.
That is the same thing I do on court now. We teach what I call a Between-Point Routine, or BPR. It is a short, repeatable sequence a player runs after every point, win or lose. It is not a motivational speech. It is mechanical on purpose, because mechanics are what hold up when emotions are high. The science backs this. Research on self-regulation in young athletes consistently shows that structured routines reduce the carryover of one mistake into the next, which is exactly the carryover that wrecks junior matches. The USTA’s player development resources lean on the same principle: teach the process, and the emotion stops driving the bus.
Why I stopped trying to make kids calm
Here is the shift that changed my coaching. I used to think the goal was a calm player. Now I think the goal is a player who can feel everything and still execute the next ball.
Calm is not realistic. These are ten-year-olds in a Sarasota summer, sweating through a tiebreak they desperately want to win. Asking them to feel nothing is like asking the heat to take a day off. What is realistic is teaching them a routine that works whether they are calm or boiling. That is a far more useful skill, and not just for tennis. A kid who learns to reset after a bad point is learning to reset after a bad grade, a hard conversation, a missed shot in any part of life.
I have had parents tell me, months later, that the between-point reset showed up at the dinner table. The kid got upset, walked away, came back. That is the part of coaching that has nothing to do with trophies, and it is the part I care about most after thirty years.
What this looks like in practice
When I work with a frustrated junior, I do not lecture. I do three things, in order.
First, I let them have the feeling. I do not rush it. “That one stung. You wanted it.” Naming it takes a surprising amount of heat out of the room.
Second, I give them the routine. We have already drilled it, so it is not new information under pressure. Turn away from the net, look at the strings, take one breath, pick the next target. The order matters. The breath comes before the decision, never after.
Third, I tie it to evidence. This connects to another pillar I lean on, Confidence Is Built, Not Given. I will tell a kid, “Last week you lost three points in a row after a bad miss. Today you lost one and came back. That is the routine working.” Real numbers, not pep talk. Kids believe what they can see in their own results, and frustration loses its grip when a player has proof that the reset actually changes outcomes.
For Sarasota parents watching from the fence
If your child is the one slamming the racket, I want to take some weight off your shoulders. It is not a character flaw and it does not mean they are a bad sport. It usually means they care, and care is the raw material of every good player I have ever coached. The work is not to extinguish the fire. The work is to build the small habits that aim it.
You can help at home without turning into a coach. When the frustration shows up, resist the urge to fix it instantly. Name it, then offer one concrete next step. Over time, your kid builds a reflex: feel it, reset, go again. That reflex will serve them long after they have hung up the racket.
Thirty years in, I am more convinced than ever that the fire is a gift. I would rather coach a kid who throws their racket and learns to reset than a kid who never cared enough to get angry in the first place. If you want to see how this fits into the rest of how we develop juniors in Sarasota, take a look at our coaching approach. And if you ever want to talk through what is going on with your own player, you can reach me directly at 941-239-4703.
The fire is going to be there either way. Let’s give it somewhere to go.
— Coach Michael