Parents ask me a version of the same question every summer: should we make practice harder or easier right now? Their junior is mid-season, hitting a lot of tennis, and they can’t tell whether the kid is being pushed too much or coasting. It’s a good instinct to ask, because the answer actually has a name in the research, and it changes how I run every session at our Sarasota courts.
I’m Michael Boothman, a USPTA Elite Professional and the founder of SRQ Tennis here in Sarasota. After thirty-plus years on court, the single most useful idea I’ve borrowed from motor-learning science is something researchers call the Challenge Point. Once you understand it, a lot of confusing practice decisions get simpler.
What the Challenge Point actually says
In 2004, researchers Mark Guadagnoli and Timothy Lee published a framework in the Journal of Motor Behavior that reframed how we think about difficulty in skill learning. Their core idea: a practice task carries information, and learning happens when the difficulty of the task matches the learner’s current ability. Too easy, and there’s nothing to learn from—the reps are just reps. Too hard, and the learner can’t extract useful information because everything is falling apart at once. Somewhere in between sits the “optimal challenge point,” where the task is hard enough to be informative but not so hard that it overwhelms. You can read the original paper through the National Library of Medicine at pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15140692.
Here’s the part parents don’t expect: the challenge point is not fixed. It moves. A drill that’s perfectly challenging for a beginner is boring for an advanced player, and a drill that sharpens an advanced player would bury a beginner. The same child at the same practice can be past their challenge point on their forehand and nowhere near it on their backhand. The coach’s real job is to keep finding that moving line, shot by shot, player by player.
Why easy reps feel productive but aren’t
This is where a lot of well-meaning practice goes wrong. If you feed a junior fifty balls to the same spot at the same pace, they’ll make a high percentage. The court looks calm. Everyone feels good. But the player’s brain isn’t being asked to solve anything, so very little sticks. High success in the moment can mean low learning over time.
The opposite failure is just as common. Throw a struggling ten-year-old into a full-speed live point against an older, stronger player and they’ll lose every ball. The success rate crashes, and so does the information they can use—they’re not learning to construct a point, they’re just surviving. Both extremes waste court time. The improvement lives in the messy middle, where a player misses enough to have something to fix but makes enough to know what “right” felt like.
How this shows up in the Six Pillars
At SRQ Tennis, this idea lives inside one of our Six Pillars: Confidence Is Built, Not Given. Confidence isn’t something you hand a kid with praise. It’s the residue of evidence—of watching yourself succeed at something that was genuinely hard yesterday. The Challenge Point Framework is the mechanism underneath that pillar. When I set a drill at the right difficulty, the player earns small, real wins at the edge of their ability, and those wins become the honest evidence their confidence is built on. Empty praise for easy reps doesn’t build anything, because the player knows, somewhere, that it wasn’t hard.
That’s also why I track numbers. If a junior is hitting 9 out of 10 to a target, the target is too easy and I shrink it or add pace or movement. If they’re hitting 3 out of 10, I’ve overshot the challenge point and I make the task simpler until they’re back in a range where they’re missing, adjusting, and making—usually somewhere around 6 or 7 out of 10 in a live drill. That success band is roughly where the research says the information is richest.
What it looks like on a Sarasota court in July
Summer is the best time to see this in action, because kids are playing enough volume that you can actually adjust the difficulty in real time. Take a live crosscourt rally drill. For one player I’ll widen the target and ask only for depth. For the next, same drill, I’ll add a smaller target zone, then a plus-one—if they land the target, they get a free ball to attack. Same station, same fifteen minutes, two different challenge points. Neither kid is bored and neither is drowning.
The signs you’ve found the right level are pretty readable, even from the fence. The player is focused rather than frustrated. They’re missing, but the misses are getting closer. They’re a little tired at the end because their brain worked, not just their legs. If your junior comes off the court saying practice was “easy,” that’s not a compliment to the session—it’s a flag that the challenge point got left behind.
What parents can do with this
You don’t need to run the drills to use the idea. When you’re evaluating a program or a private coach, watch whether the difficulty gets adjusted for your specific kid or whether everyone runs the same reps regardless of level. Ask how the coach knows a drill is working. A good answer sounds like a number and a plan to change it, not “they’re doing great.” That’s most of what my coaching approach is built to do—meet each player at their edge and keep moving the edge as they grow.
The Challenge Point Framework is really just a scientific way of saying something every good teacher already knows: people grow when the work is hard enough to matter and doable enough to finish. Our job on court is to keep finding that line for your junior, one ball at a time.
If you want to talk about where your child’s challenge point sits right now, reach me at 941-239-4703 or michael@srq.tennis. Summer is the right time to get it dialed in.
— Michael Boothman