There are three weeks left in the summer season. Camp runs through July 31, school picks up in mid-August, and somewhere in between, most junior players quietly lose the thing they spent ten weeks building.
I’m Michael Boothman. I’ve coached in Sarasota for over thirty years, and I’ve watched this same pattern repeat every August. A kid trains four days a week from June through July. The forehand gets cleaner. The second serve stops being a liability. Then school starts, practice drops to once a week, and by late September the player is asking why the shots that worked in July don’t work anymore.
The fix isn’t more court time in August. It’s what you do in the last three weeks of July.
Nobody knows what actually improved
Ask a junior player at the end of summer what got better, and you’ll usually hear something vague. “My forehand feels better.” “I’m hitting harder.” “My serve is more consistent.”
Ask them how they know, and the room goes quiet.
This is the problem the fourth pillar of our system exists to solve: Confidence Is Built, Not Given. Confidence isn’t a pep talk. It isn’t a coach telling a player they’ve improved. It’s evidence — a number the player collected themselves, that they can point to when a match gets tight and the doubt shows up.
A player who says “my second serve is better” has a feeling. A player who says “in June I landed 11 out of 20 second serves past the service line into the backhand box, and last week I landed 16” has proof. When that player is down 4-5, 30-40 in October and has to hit a second serve, those two players are not the same person.
The last three weeks of summer are when you go get the number.
What a summer audit looks like
Here’s what I run with players in mid-July. It takes about forty minutes and it doesn’t require anything you don’t already have.
Pick three things — no more. One serve target, one groundstroke target, one movement or point-play measure. Then score each one the same way you scored it in June, under the same conditions.
Serve. Twenty second serves, live, no restarts. Count how many land in the correct half of the box. Not “in” — in the half you aimed at. This matters because in-play second serves that sit in the middle of the box get attacked, and the player learns nothing from counting them as successes.
Groundstroke. This is where the first pillar, Accuracy Inside Representative Conditions, does its work. Don’t stand at the baseline and hit twenty balls from a basket. Basket-fed accuracy is a lie — it tells you what a player can do when nothing is moving. Instead, rally cross-court, live ball, and count how many of the player’s forehands land past the service line on their target side across a 30-ball rally set. If they can hit 8 out of 10 to a target inside a live rally, that number means something. If they can only do it off a feed, it means almost nothing.
Point play. Play ten points from a neutral cross-court rally start. Count how many the player wins with their pattern — the shot combination they’ve been building all summer — versus how many they win because the other kid missed. The second number is not progress.
Write all three down. Date it. That’s the audit.
The number matters less than the trend
Parents sometimes see the audit and get nervous about the raw score. Eleven out of twenty second serves sounds bad. It isn’t bad or good — it’s a baseline. The only comparison that matters is the June number against the July number.
I’ve had players go from 11 to 16 on second serves and be disappointed, because 16 out of 20 still felt like failure. That’s a coaching moment, not a training one. A five-serve improvement across ten weeks, at age twelve, in Florida summer heat, is real development. The player didn’t feel it because improvement inside your own body is almost invisible while it’s happening. That’s precisely why we write it down.
It also cuts the other direction. If a player trained four days a week for ten weeks and the numbers didn’t move, something in the training was wrong. Better to know that in July than to find out in a December tournament. The audit protects the player from wasted effort as much as it protects them from false modesty.
Protecting the gain through August
Once you have the numbers, the fall plan gets simple. You don’t need to maintain everything. You need to maintain the things that moved.
The research on the spacing effect is consistent across learning domains: skills consolidate through spaced, distributed practice, not through cramming and then stopping. Cepeda and colleagues’ quantitative synthesis of the distributed-practice literature found that the same total practice time produces better long-term retention when it’s spread out than when it’s packed into a burst. The effect shows up in motor skill work too, and it matches what I see on court every August. Three thirty-minute touches across a week will hold a serve motion better than one two-hour session on Saturday.
So the August plan for most of my players is unglamorous:
- Two short serve sessions a week. Fifteen minutes. Twenty balls to a target. Write the number down.
- One live-ball session. Not a lesson necessarily — a hitting partner, a rally with a parent who can keep a ball in play, anything with a live ball coming back.
- One competitive set. Against anyone. The competitive muscle atrophies faster than the technical one.
That’s roughly two and a half hours a week. It will not build new skill. It will keep the ten weeks of summer from evaporating, and it fits inside a school schedule that suddenly has homework in it.
The conversation to have this week
If you’re a parent reading this in mid-July, here’s the useful thing you can do in the next seven days: ask your kid what number they want to move before July 31.
Not “what do you want to work on.” Kids will answer that question with whatever they think you want to hear. Ask for a number. A specific one. “I want to get my second serve from 11 to 15.” Then ask them how they’ll know when they’ve done it.
That question does more for a junior player than another lesson does. It moves the ownership of the improvement from the coach to the player, which is the whole point. My job is to give them the drills and the honest feedback. Their job is to collect the evidence. When they own the evidence, they stop needing me to tell them they’re good.
Three weeks left. Go get a number.
Michael Boothman is a USPTA Elite Professional and the founder of SRQ Tennis in Sarasota, Florida, where he has coached juniors and adults for more than thirty years. Read more about his coaching approach.