Ask most junior players what they hate doing in a match, and a lot of them will say the same thing: coming to the net. They can hit a hundred clean forehands from the baseline, but the second they have to move forward, split-step, and volley a moving ball, everything falls apart. I’ve watched this pattern for thirty years of coaching here in Sarasota, and I’m Michael Boothman — I run SRQ Tennis on our public courts around town. The net game is usually the last piece juniors trust, and it’s almost always because of how they were taught it.
Here’s the trap. Most net-play instruction happens with a coach feeding balls. The player stands at the service line, the coach tosses a soft floater, and the player punches a tidy volley into an open court. It looks great. It feels productive. And it transfers almost nothing to a real point, because in a real point nobody feeds you a floater. You earn the net with a good approach shot, you read where your opponent is scrambling, and you volley a ball that’s dipping, spinning, or coming faster than you’d like. The clean fed-ball volley is a different skill than the one the match actually asks for.
Why fed balls don’t teach the net
This is where the second of my six coaching pillars — Live Ball Is the Method — does the heavy lifting. Skills built inside live, unpredictable rallies hold up under match pressure far better than skills built inside neat, repeatable feeds. The research backs this up: motor-learning studies on what’s called contextual interference consistently show that practice with more variability and less predictability produces worse-looking practice sessions but noticeably better retention and transfer to new situations. A player who practices volleys off a live, awkward ball looks messier on Tuesday and plays better on Saturday.
The USTA’s player development materials on transition-game training make the same point in coaching language: net skills have to be trained inside the sequence that produces them — the approach, the movement forward, the split-step, and only then the volley. You can read more about how they frame court-position development in the USTA’s junior development resources. Isolate the volley from the approach and you’ve taught a party trick, not a point-winning skill.
The Approach-and-Finish drill
So here’s the drill I actually use with my Sarasota juniors. It’s simple to run and it puts the whole sequence together.
Set up a live cross-court rally between the player and me (or between two players). The rule is this: somewhere in the rally, I’ll feed a short ball — not a soft floater, a genuinely short ball that lands around the service line, the kind you’d actually get in a match. The player’s job is to read it, move forward, hit an approach shot to a target, close the net, and finish the point with a volley or two off whatever comes back live.
A few specifics that make it work:
- The short ball is unpredictable. The player never knows which shot in the rally will be the short one. That’s the whole point. In a match you don’t get a warning, so the drill shouldn’t give one either.
- The approach has a target. I put a cone or a towel down the line, about three feet inside the sideline. The approach shot has to go there. This is my first pillar, Accuracy Inside Representative Conditions, working alongside the second — placement matters, but it has to be built inside the live, game-like sequence, not on a static target with no pressure.
- The point plays out live. After the approach, I don’t stop. I hit a real passing shot or a real lob, and the player has to solve it. Volley, overhead, first volley then second volley — whatever the ball demands.
We keep score. First to seven approach-points. The scoring matters more than you’d think — it turns a drill into a small competition, which is the exact environment where my sixth pillar, Channel the Fire, gets a workout. Juniors who get quietly frustrated at the net learn to reset with their between-point routine and go again, instead of avoiding the net entirely for the rest of the day.
What to watch for as a coach or parent
The most common thing I see is the player rushing the approach shot because they’re already thinking about the volley. The fix isn’t “slow down” — that’s vague and it doesn’t help. The fix is a number: I ask the player to hit eight of ten approach shots past the service line and inside the sideline cone before we add the finishing volley back in. Give them the evidence that the approach is solid, and the volley stops feeling like a leap of faith. That’s my fourth pillar, Confidence Is Built Not Given — you don’t talk a kid into trusting their net game, you show them the count.
Parents watching from the fence can help by resisting the urge to celebrate only the winners. The approach shot that sets up an easy volley is the shot that won the point; the volley just collected it. When you point that out on the ride home, you’re reinforcing the part of the sequence that actually decides things, and you’re teaching your junior to value construction over flash.
Running it at home
You don’t need a coach feeding for this. Two juniors can run it themselves: one player commits to sending a short ball at a random point in every rally, and the other has to attack it. Rotate who’s the attacker every seven points. It’s not as controlled as having a coach shape the balls, but the core skill — reading the short ball live and committing forward — gets plenty of reps. On our Sarasota public courts I’ll often set two pairs of juniors running this side by side while I move between them, and it holds up fine without me hovering over every ball.
The net game isn’t a talent some juniors have and others don’t. It’s a sequence, and like any sequence it gets trustworthy through live reps under a little pressure, not through tidy feeds that fall apart the moment a match starts. Build it the way it’s actually used, keep score, count the makes, and watch how much faster a hesitant player starts stepping forward.
If you want to see how the rest of the six pillars shape the way we build skills at SRQ Tennis, take a look at our coaching approach. And if your junior is one of those players who lives on the baseline and dreads the net, that’s exactly the kind of thing worth working on this summer — reach me at michael@srq.tennis and we’ll build a plan.
— Coach Michael