Most people assume that after 30 years of coaching, the natural move is to settle into a private club with manicured courts, a pro shop, and a membership roster. I went the other way. I’m Michael Boothman, a USPTA Elite Professional, and I built SRQ Tennis on the public courts of Sarasota—Potter Park, Pineview, the places anyone in this city can drive to and walk onto. People ask me about that choice often enough that it’s worth explaining plainly.
The short version: I’d rather coach where the players are than where the prestige is. The longer version has more to do with what I’ve learned actually works, and what tends to get in the way.
The court doesn’t make the player
I’ve coached at private facilities. They’re comfortable. But I noticed something over the years that bothered me: the nicer the setting, the easier it became for everyone—coach, parent, player—to confuse the experience of tennis with the development of a tennis player. A clean court and a smooth booking system feel like progress. They aren’t. They’re amenities.
What develops a player is the quality of the work that happens between the lines, and that work is identical whether the surface costs a club $40,000 a year to maintain or whether it’s a county court with a slightly faded baseline. A live ball coming at a ten-year-old at a real pace, in a real rally, forces the same decisions and builds the same skills in both places. The geometry of a well-struck forehand doesn’t care about the zip code.
When I stripped away the parts of a private-club setup that weren’t doing anything for the actual coaching, public courts were what was left. They’re not a compromise. For what I’m trying to do, they’re the right tool.
Confidence Is Built, Not Given
One of the Six Pillars that organizes everything I do is Confidence Is Built, Not Given. The idea is simple and it’s backed by how people actually learn: confidence isn’t something a coach hands a player with encouragement. It’s the residue of evidence. A player believes they can hit a cross-court backhand under pressure because they’ve done it, on camera, in front of a target, enough times that the belief is earned rather than borrowed.
That pillar applies to building a coaching business too, and it’s part of why public courts made sense. I didn’t want SRQ Tennis to run on the borrowed confidence of a fancy location—the kind where a family signs up partly because the building looks the part. I wanted families to stay because their kid’s footwork measurably improved, because the numbers we track moved, because they could see the work paying off. If the only thing holding a program together is the polish of the setting, the actual coaching has stopped being the product. I’d rather be judged on the coaching.
Access is the whole point
There’s a community argument here too, and I don’t want to dress it up as more noble than it is—it’s just practical. Sarasota has good public tennis infrastructure. A lot of the kids who could become real players never set foot in a private club, because club membership is a barrier their families aren’t going to clear for a sport their child hasn’t even committed to yet. Meeting families on public courts removes a gate that has nothing to do with whether the child can play.
I cap my groups at six players. That number is non-negotiable, and it’s the real driver of quality—six kids means every player gets live reps, individual corrections, and actual court time instead of standing in a line of fifteen waiting for a turn. You can run a six-player group on a public court just as well as anywhere else. What you can’t do is fake individual attention with a big roster and a nice clubhouse. The cap matters more than the venue, and the venue keeps the cap affordable.
What 30 years actually taught me
Early in my career I think I would have taken the club job without much thought. Three decades in, I’ve watched enough players develop—and enough talented kids quietly drift away from the sport—to know what moves the needle and what’s just decoration.
The decoration is seductive because it’s easy to point at. A glossy facility, a long list of credentials on the wall, a calendar full of clinics. The substance is harder to show off: a coach who feeds fewer balls and lets players solve more problems, who tracks 8-out-of-10 to a target instead of saying “looking good,” who keeps groups small enough that nobody hides. None of that requires a private club. Some of it is actively harder to protect inside one, where the business pressure runs toward bigger groups and more billable court hours.
Choosing public courts was, in the end, a way of keeping the coaching honest. There’s no setting to hide behind. If a family in Sarasota is going to drive to Potter Park twice a week and pay for lessons, the only thing they’re paying for is what happens in that hour. That’s exactly the deal I want to be on the other side of.
The trade-offs are real
I’ll be straight about the downsides, because pretending there aren’t any would undercut the point. Public courts mean weather with no indoor backup, occasional scheduling around other users, and surfaces that aren’t always pristine. We plan around all of it—makeup sessions when we have to reschedule for weather, and a clear understanding with families about how it works. It’s a trade I make on purpose: a little more logistical friction in exchange for access, affordability, and a setup where the coaching has to stand on its own.
If you want to understand more about how I approach development and why the small-group, evidence-based model is the spine of everything here, the about page lays out the philosophy in more detail. And if you’re a parent weighing whether a credentialed coach is worth seeking out, the USPTA’s standards for certified professionals are a reasonable place to understand what that certification actually means.
Thirty years in, the choice still feels right. The court doesn’t make the player. The work does. And the work travels.
If you’ve got questions about how the program runs, you can reach me directly—Michael Boothman, michael@srq.tennis or 941-239-4703. I answer my own messages.
See you on the court.