People ask me a version of the same question almost every week: “If demand is there, why not run groups of ten or twelve and make more per court hour?” It’s a fair business question. After 30 years of coaching, my answer hasn’t changed, and it’s the reason I built SRQ Tennis the way I did. I’m Michael Boothman, and every group session I run in Sarasota is capped at six players. Not eight if a friend tags along, not seven “just this once.” Six. Here’s the thinking behind a number that looks small on paper but decides almost everything about how a kid actually develops.
The math nobody likes to do
Start with court time, because that’s what a parent is really buying. A one-hour group session is roughly 50 minutes of actual on-court work once you account for transitions. Put twelve kids on one court and, even with good organization, most of them spend the hour in a line. A child might hit live for eight or nine minutes total and watch for forty. Cut the group to six and that same child is now hitting for twenty-plus minutes, getting two to three times the contact with the ball.
That difference compounds. Motor learning research is clear that skills are built through repetition with feedback, not through watching someone else repeat. A 2004 review in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise on the dose-response relationship in skill acquisition makes the same point that anyone who’s stood on a court for three decades already knows in their gut: reps matter, and there’s no shortcut around them (NIH/PubMed). A bigger group doesn’t give you more coaching. It gives you more waiting.
Live Ball Is the Method — and it needs room
One of the Six Pillars I coach by is Live Ball Is the Method: players develop inside real rallies and game-like situations, not standing in a feed line catching balls off a basket. Live ball is messier and harder to run than basket feeding, and it falls apart fast in a crowd. You cannot run a real cross-court rally game, a king-of-the-court rotation, or a serve-plus-one point with twelve kids and one coach. There isn’t enough court, and there isn’t enough of me.
Six is the number where live ball still works. I can put three pairs into a rally pattern, rotate them through points, and keep every player in a real exchange instead of a drill that only looks like tennis. When the group gets bigger, you’re forced back into lines and fed balls — exactly the thing I think slows juniors down. So the cap isn’t a marketing gimmick. It’s the price of being able to coach the way I believe works.
I can’t track what I can’t see
The other reason is feedback. I keep numbers on my players — forehands to a target, first-serve percentage in a live game, how a kid responds after losing a point. That tracking is how I keep my promise that progress is something you can see, not something I just tell a parent over text. Watch a child hit 8 out of 10 forehands to a deep cross-court target two weeks running, and you’ve got real evidence the work is paying off.
You cannot do that for twelve kids in an hour. You can barely glance at them. At six, I can actually watch each player hit, catch the thing they’re doing on the third ball that they don’t do on the first, and give one specific correction that sticks. The cap is what makes individual attention a real thing instead of a line on a flyer.
What it costs me — and why I pay it
I’ll be honest about the trade-off, because the business side is real. Six players per court means I leave money on the table every single session compared to a coach packing twelve in. It means I sometimes have to tell a family there’s a wait for a spot, which is never a fun text to send. It means more hours on court for me to serve the same number of kids.
I run SRQ Tennis as a small business, on public Sarasota parks instead of expensive clubs, and that model only works if the coaching is actually worth the premium. A group of twelve at a lower price isn’t a better deal — it’s the same line-standing your kid could do anywhere. I’d rather charge a fair rate for six and have every parent be able to point to what changed in their kid’s game. That’s the bet I’ve made for 30 years, and it’s still the one I’d make today.
What six looks like for your kid
Concretely, in a six-player Sarasota group session a junior can expect: twenty-plus minutes of live ball instead of a few minutes between long waits; at least a handful of individual corrections from me by name; a real point-play segment every session, not just feeding drills; and progress I can describe to you with a number rather than a vague “he’s doing great.” That last part matters more than people expect — vague praise doesn’t build anything. Evidence does.
If you’ve watched your child stand in lines at a big clinic and wondered why the forehand isn’t changing, the group size is a big part of the answer. More bodies on a court is not more tennis. It’s the same hour, sliced thinner.
I’m not against big clinics for what they are — a fun way to get a lot of kids moving. But if your goal is for your junior to actually get better at tennis, ask any program you’re considering one simple question: how many players per court? The answer tells you most of what you need to know.
Want to see how a small-group session is structured, or talk through whether it’s the right fit for your junior? You can read more about how I coach on the coaching page, or reach me directly at 941-239-4703 or michael@srq.tennis. I’ll give you a straight answer — including telling you if a bigger clinic is genuinely the better call for your kid right now.
— Michael Boothman, USPTA Elite Professional, SRQ Tennis, Sarasota FL