There is a folder on my laptop I do not open very often. It holds teaching systems I built over the years, taught to hundreds of players, printed on handouts, and eventually threw out. Acronyms. Checklists. Clever little mnemonics that made a serve sound like a five-step recipe.
I am Michael Boothman. I have coached tennis for more than thirty years, most of them here in Sarasota, and I have been wrong about a lot of it. Not wrong in the small ways coaches are always wrong — a bad drill, a misread match. Wrong in the structural way. Wrong about the thing I was most confident in.
That folder is the most useful thing I own.
The frameworks I killed
For a long stretch I taught the forehand as a spelled-out sequence. Each letter was a checkpoint. Grip, unit turn, shoulder, extension, follow-through. Kids memorized it. Parents loved it — it looked like a curriculum. It felt like teaching.
Here is what actually happened on the court. A ten-year-old would step in to hit a ball that was arriving in about six-tenths of a second, and somewhere in that six-tenths she was supposed to run an eight-item mental checklist. She could not. Nobody can. What she did instead was slow down her swing so she could think, and a slowed-down swing is a worse swing. I had built a system that made players worse in exactly the moment I most wanted them to be better.
I retired it. I retired several others with it. What replaced them is smaller and harder to put on a handout: center contact and a square racquet face. Two things. Everything else in the swing exists to serve those two things, and the body will find its own way there if you give it enough real reps and enough honest feedback.
That is the pillar I lean on hardest now — Technique Is Geometry. I do not coach the choreography of a swing anymore. I coach the contact. Where did the ball meet the strings, and what direction was the face pointing when it did? Those two variables explain most of where the ball went. The rest is a player’s own signature, and it is not mine to sand down.
Why the change was so slow
I want to be careful here, because “I changed my mind” is an easy thing for a coach to say and a hard thing for a coach to do. Those frameworks were not just teaching tools. They were my identity. I had taught them so long that abandoning them felt like admitting the last decade of lessons had been a waste.
They were not a waste. The players learned. Kids improve under almost any attentive adult who shows up consistently and cares. That is the trap. A coaching method does not have to be right to look like it is working, because juniors are growing, practicing, and maturing on their own the entire time. Improvement is not proof.
This is where the evidence part matters, and it is why I am so stubborn about counting things now. If I claim a drill works, I want the number. Eight forehands out of ten to a target in a live rally, not a vague sense that the ball is coming off cleaner. Confidence Is Built, Not Given is a pillar for the player, but it is a discipline for the coach too. I am not allowed to believe my own methods work because they feel good to teach. The scoreboard on the court has to say so.
What the research kept telling me
The uncomfortable part is that motor learning researchers had been saying this for decades while I was printing handouts. Practice that feels efficient often produces the least durable learning. Practice that feels messy and error-filled — variable, randomized, game-like — produces skill that survives contact with a real opponent.
Every honest coach eventually runs into this. Your beautifully organized basket-feeding session, where every ball arrives at the same height and pace, will produce gorgeous strokes that evaporate on Saturday morning. The player did not fail. The practice failed. That realization is what pushed me toward live-ball training as the default rather than the reward at the end of a lesson.
The professional coaching bodies have moved this direction too. If you are a coach reading this and you have not spent real time inside the current continuing-education material, it is worth the hours — the USPTA certification and education pathways are a reasonable place to start, and they are considerably more rigorous than they were when I first came through.
Where this leaves a parent
If you are a parent watching a lesson in Sarasota and trying to judge whether a coach knows what they are doing, I would not listen for the system. Systems are cheap. Anyone can build an acronym in an afternoon.
Listen for what happens after a player misses.
A coach who is holding onto a framework will explain why the player deviated from the framework. A coach who is holding onto the player will ask what the player felt, look at where the ball met the strings, and change one thing. Then they will watch to see if it worked. If it did not, they will change something else. That loop — try, measure, adjust — is the entire job.
And ask the coach what they used to teach that they no longer teach. If the answer is nothing, either they are new or they have not been paying attention. Thirty years of coaching without a single retired idea is not thirty years of experience. It is one year of experience repeated thirty times.
The folder stays
I have not deleted those old systems. I keep them because they are a record of a person who was certain and wrong, and I am probably that person right now about something I cannot yet see. Ten years from now there will be a pillar I defend today that I will quietly stop teaching, and I hope I notice it faster than I noticed the last one.
That is not a weakness in the method. That is the method. The players I coach at Potter Park and Pineview are not learning tennis from a finished body of knowledge handed down from a mountaintop. They are learning it from a guy who counts, who checks, and who is willing to be embarrassed by his own notes.
Which, when I think about it, is exactly what I am asking them to do every time they miss a forehand.
If you want to know more about how I coach and what I have landed on for now, read a bit more about me and SRQ Tennis. And if you disagree with something here, tell me. I have been wrong before and I would rather find out early.
— Michael Boothman michael@srq.tennis · 941-239-4703