Every June I get the same question from parents, usually around the third week of summer break: “Should my kid be practicing every day?” The court time is suddenly available, camp is in full swing, and there’s a worry that if other families are grinding seven days a week, falling behind is just a matter of arithmetic. I’m Michael Boothman, and after 30-plus years coaching juniors here in Sarasota, my honest answer surprises a lot of people: more is not the goal. Better-spaced, higher-quality practice is.
This matters more in summer than any other season. The heat is real, the days are long, and an enthusiastic 10-year-old will happily hit until they’re cooked because they don’t yet have the judgment to stop. That judgment is the parent’s job, and it’s a hard one when the messaging everywhere else is “outwork everyone.” So let’s talk about what the evidence actually says, and how I’d structure a junior’s week.
The myth of the daily grind
The instinct that more hours equals faster improvement comes from how adults think about work. Put in the time, get the result. But skill acquisition in young athletes doesn’t follow a simple input-output line. Learning happens during practice, but it gets consolidated—locked in—during rest. When you stack high-intensity sessions back to back with no recovery, you’re not adding learning. You’re often interfering with the learning you already did.
This is the heart of the fifth of my Six Pillars: Movement & Conditioning in the Right Order. The right order isn’t just about how you warm up inside a single session—joint prep, then muscle activation, then high-intensity work. It also applies across the week. A young body and a young nervous system need the low-intensity and rest days as much as they need the hard ones. Skip the recovery and you don’t get a tougher kid; you get a tired one who plateaus and, too often, an injured one.
The injury part isn’t hypothetical. The American Academy of Pediatrics has been clear for years that single-sport specialization and high training volume in young athletes raise the risk of overuse injuries, and they recommend that kids take at least one to two days off per week from organized sport, plus extended time off from their primary sport across the year. You can read their guidance on youth sports specialization from the AAP. It’s worth ten minutes of any tennis parent’s time.
What a good summer week actually looks like
I’m not going to hand you a rigid prescription, because a 7-year-old and a 14-year-old competing in tournaments need very different things. But here’s the shape I coach toward for a developing junior who loves the game and wants to get better:
Three to four quality on-court sessions a week. Not “hit until you’re bored.” Sessions with a clear focus—live-ball rallies, a target to beat, a number to track. Ninety good minutes beats three hours of mindless ball-bashing every time.
One or two genuine rest or play days. And I mean play—swimming, riding bikes, a different sport, unstructured movement. This is not wasted time. For a young athlete it’s part of the development, both physically and for keeping the love of sport alive.
One day off completely. No court, no organized sport. The body consolidates, the kid resets, and they come back hungry instead of flat.
For tournament-track players the on-court volume goes up, but the principle holds: the rest days don’t disappear, they get more deliberate. The best juniors I’ve coached over three decades weren’t the ones who practiced the most hours. They were the ones who practiced with intent and recovered well enough to keep doing it for years without breaking down.
The signs your junior is doing too much
Kids rarely say “I’m overtrained.” They show you instead. Watch for a few things over the summer:
A normally eager player who starts dragging their feet about going to the court. A drop in coordination or footwork that doesn’t bounce back after a normal rest. Complaints of aches—especially in the same spot, like the shoulder, elbow, or knees—that keep coming back. Irritability or a short fuse on court that’s out of character. And the big one: the joy going out of it. When tennis starts feeling like a chore to a kid who used to beg to play, that’s your signal to pull back, not push harder.
None of these mean stop tennis. They mean adjust the load. A week of lighter, fun-focused play often brings a kid right back.
Quality is the real lever
Here’s the part I most want Sarasota parents to take away: the families who worry their kid isn’t doing enough are usually focused on the wrong variable. The lever that actually moves junior development isn’t volume—it’s the quality and structure of the practice, and the recovery that lets it stick.
That’s why our groups cap at six players: more reps that matter, more live-ball situations, more individual feedback per kid. It’s why we track real numbers instead of vague “good job” praise. And it’s why I’ll tell a parent to take a rest day even when they’ve already paid for the court. The long game—a healthy, motivated player who’s still loving tennis at 16 and beyond—is built on the right amount of the right work, not the most work.
If you want to see how we structure that work at SRQ Tennis, our coaching philosophy page lays out the full approach. And if you’re trying to figure out the right summer rhythm for your specific kid, that’s exactly the kind of thing I’m happy to talk through—reach me at 941-239-4703 or michael@srq.tennis.
Summer is a gift for a junior tennis player. Long days, open courts, time to actually build something. Just remember that building something well includes knowing when to let the body rest. The kid who takes Sunday off isn’t falling behind. More often than not, they’re the one still improving in October.
— Michael Boothman, USPTA Elite Professional, SRQ Tennis, Sarasota FL