There is a moment in almost every junior session where a coach has to decide who is in charge of the next five minutes. Most of us were trained to keep that control tight — the coach picks the drill, the coach picks the reps, the coach picks when it ends. I coached that way for years. But somewhere in the last decade of running SRQ Tennis here in Sarasota, I started handing more of those small decisions back to the players, and their learning got faster, not messier.
My name is Michael Boothman. I have been coaching tennis for more than thirty years, and if you had told 25-year-old me that letting a ten-year-old choose which drill comes next would produce better tennis, I would have laughed. It sounds like a recipe for chaos. It is not. It turns out that giving a young player a little bit of control over their own practice is one of the most reliable ways to help them learn — and there is solid research behind it.
What the science actually says
Motor learning researchers have a name for this: autonomy support. The idea is that when a learner gets to make even trivial choices during practice — which of two drills to start with, how many balls in a set, what color cone to aim at — they learn the underlying skill better and retain it longer than learners who are given no choice at all.
This is not a soft, feel-good claim. In the OPTIMAL theory of motor learning, autonomy is treated as one of the core drivers of how well a movement skill sticks, alongside expectancy and attentional focus. You can read the framework in the peer-reviewed paper by Wulf and Lewthwaite, Optimizing performance through intrinsic motivation and attention for learning, which pulled together a large body of experiments showing that choice — even choice over something unrelated to the actual skill — improved retention.
Why would picking a cone color help a forehand? The best current explanation is that a small choice raises the player’s engagement and lowers the low-grade anxiety of being told what to do every second. A player who feels some ownership over the session pays closer attention to what their own body is doing. Attention is the whole game in skill acquisition.
How this connects to the Six Pillars
This lands squarely inside one of the Six Pillars I built SRQ Tennis on: Confidence Is Built, Not Given. I cannot hand a junior confidence with a pep talk. Confidence is what is left over after a player accumulates evidence that they can do the thing. Autonomy support is a delivery system for that evidence.
When a player chooses their own target and then hits 8 out of 10 to it, the success belongs to them in a way it never does when I chose the target. They made the call, they executed it, they saw the number. That is a very different internal experience than completing a drill I assigned. Over a season, those owned successes stack up into the kind of confidence that holds together under pressure at a tournament, instead of the fragile kind that evaporates the first time a coach is not standing courtside.
What it looks like on a Sarasota court
I want to be clear that autonomy support is not the same as letting kids run the session. I still set the structure, the standards, and the pillar we are working on that day. The choices I offer are small and bounded. A few examples from a normal week at Potter Park or Pineview:
- “We are doing crosscourt rallies either way — do you want to start forehands or backhands?”
- “Pick your target: the alley or the deep corner. Then give me 8 out of 10 to it before we move the pace up.”
- “You get to call how many serves in this set — six or eight. Then we hold you to it.”
- “Which drill do we do first, the recovery-step ladder or the approach-and-finish? You choose the order.”
Notice that none of those choices lower the standard. The 85/100 Rule still applies. The player is not choosing whether to work hard or whether accuracy matters — those are non-negotiable. They are choosing the path through the work. That distinction is everything. Bounded choice keeps the rigor and adds the ownership.
I also find it changes the emotional temperature of a session, which matters for another pillar entirely — Channel the Fire. A frustrated junior who feels like practice is being done to them tends to spiral. A junior who has some agency in the session has an easier time using that competitive frustration as fuel instead of letting it become a meltdown. When they own a piece of the plan, they own the outcome, and ownership settles a hot head faster than any lecture I can give.
For parents watching from the fence
If you are a parent, here is the practical version. Look for a coaching environment where your child is occasionally asked to make a decision, not just follow one. It is a quiet marker of a coach who understands how kids actually learn. And you can do a version of it at home: instead of telling your junior what to practice against the garage door, ask them to pick the target and the number, then let them chase it. You will often see more focus in ten self-chosen minutes than in thirty assigned ones.
None of this replaces good technique, real reps, or honest feedback. It sits on top of them. The Two Laws of Ball-Striking do not care who chose the drill. But who chose the drill turns out to shape how deeply the player absorbs everything else — and after thirty years on the court, I will take every honest advantage I can find for the kids I coach.
If you want to see how this fits into the way we run our junior groups, the full approach lives on our coaching page. And if your Sarasota junior is ready to work inside a structure that treats them like a partner in their own development, you can reach me directly at 941-239-4703 or michael@srq.tennis.
See you on the court.
— Coach Michael