Every year around this time, a parent asks me some version of the same question: “What happens to his tennis when school starts?”
It’s a fair question, and it deserves a better answer than “we’ll figure it out.” I’m Michael Boothman — I’ve coached in Sarasota for over thirty years, and I’ve watched the August transition go well and go badly enough times to know it isn’t luck. Sarasota County schools go back in the second week of August. Which means we’re about four weeks out from the single biggest disruption to junior tennis in the calendar year — bigger than the holidays, bigger than tournament season.
Here’s what actually happens, and what to do about it.
The summer schedule was never the real schedule
June and July are an artificial environment. Your kid has eleven hours of daylight with nothing scheduled in them. Four sessions a week is easy. Two hours on a Tuesday afternoon is easy. Everything is easy, because time isn’t competing with anything.
Then August 10th arrives and the day collapses. School until 3:00 or 3:30. Homework that’s real now. A bus ride or a pickup line. Dinner. A younger sibling with their own thing. Suddenly the four-session week that felt effortless in July is a logistics problem you’re solving at 6:45 in the morning.
What I see happen next is predictable: families try to hold the summer schedule through September, it breaks in week three, and then they overcorrect and drop to almost nothing. The kid loses two months. By the time it stabilizes in October, they’re behind where they were in July, and everyone quietly decides tennis “didn’t stick.”
The fix isn’t more discipline. It’s building the fall schedule before the fall arrives, and building it honest.
Build for the week you’ll actually have
Here’s the exercise I run with parents in late July. Take a blank week. Not an idealized week — the real one, with the traffic and the homework and the Thursday thing your daughter does. Mark the hours that are genuinely, reliably free. Not “we could probably make it work” free. Free.
Most families find two. Occasionally three. Almost never four.
Two sessions a week, held every single week from August through May, will beat four sessions a week that collapse by Labor Day. This isn’t a consolation prize — it’s the better plan. Consistency over months is what builds a tennis player. A big summer followed by a dead fall is a sine wave, and sine waves average out to nothing.
So plan for two. If a third opens up some weeks, that’s a bonus, not the baseline. Baselines you can’t hit are just scheduled disappointment.
Shorter sessions aren’t a downgrade
The other thing that changes in August is session length, and parents tend to read that as a loss. A ninety-minute summer session becomes sixty minutes in the fall, and it feels like the kid is getting less.
They’re getting less time. Whether they’re getting less learning is a separate question, and the answer is usually no.
This is where the first of our Six Pillars — Accuracy Inside Representative Conditions — does the work. The pillar says that placement gets built inside live, game-like conditions, not in isolation. The standard I hold is the 85/100 Rule: we’re looking for a player to hit their target 8 out of 10 times in a live drill, under pressure, with a real ball coming back — not 10 out of 10 off a basket feed that proves nothing.
That standard is time-efficient in a way that basket feeding isn’t. A sixty-minute session that’s mostly live ball, mostly at target, mostly under some form of pressure, produces more transferable skill than ninety minutes of standing in line waiting for a feed. When the clock shrinks, you don’t water the session down — you cut the parts that were never doing much anyway. The warm-up gets tighter. The talking gets shorter. The live ball ratio goes up.
I’d rather have a junior for sixty focused minutes twice a week for nine months than ninety unfocused minutes four times a week for two.
Protect the thing that’s easiest to lose
The first casualty of a packed fall is always the same: the stuff that happens outside the lesson. The serve reps in the driveway. The ten minutes of shadow footwork. The tossing.
I understand why. It’s unscheduled, so it’s invisible, so it evaporates. But serve development in particular lives and dies on frequency, not on session length. Fifty serves three times a week at home, done with attention, moves a serve more than anything I can do in a lesson where we also need to work on four other things.
So when you build the fall week, don’t just schedule the court time. Schedule the fifteen minutes. Put it somewhere it can survive — right after school before homework starts, or Saturday morning before the day gets away. Somewhere it’s not competing with the hardest hour of the day.
Talk to your coach in July, not September
This is the part most families miss. By the third week of August, the fall schedule is full. The Monday 5:00 slot is gone. The small group your kid fits into is closed.
I cap groups at six players, which I’m not flexible on — six is the number where I can actually see every player, every ball, every session. That cap means fall spots are genuinely limited, and they go in late July and early August. A parent who calls me in September isn’t being disorganized; they just didn’t know the calendar works this way.
If you’re thinking about the fall at all, have the conversation now. Even a rough one. “Here’s the week we think we’ll have, here’s what we’re hoping to work on” gives me enough to build around. You can find more about how I structure development on my coaching page, or just text me — that’s usually faster.
The measure that matters
One last thing. When you get to November and you’re trying to figure out whether the fall is working, don’t measure it by how the kid looked on Saturday. Kids look bad on Saturdays for a hundred reasons that have nothing to do with development.
Measure it by whether the number moved. If in August a player was hitting 5 out of 10 to a cross-court target in a live rally, and by November they’re at 8 out of 10, the fall worked — regardless of what any given session looked like. That’s the whole point of tracking real numbers: it makes progress legible when your gut is unreliable. Your gut is always unreliable in November.
The USTA’s American Development Model is built on the same premise — long-term athletic development, keeping kids in the sport for a lifetime rather than optimizing for the next result. It’s worth reading if you’re trying to think in years rather than weeks.
August is coming. The families who handle it well are the ones who decided in July what the fall was going to look like. The ones who struggle are the ones who found out in September.
Four weeks. Build the week you’ll actually have.
— Coach Michael