Every so often a parent stands courtside in Sarasota, watches one of my groups for twenty minutes, and says some version of the same thing: “This doesn’t look like a lesson. It looks like they’re just playing.” I take that as a compliment. After more than thirty years of coaching, I’ve come to believe that the closer practice looks to a real match, the more it actually teaches. My name is Michael Boothman, I’m a USPTA Elite Professional and the founder of SRQ Tennis, and if there’s one idea I’d want a Sarasota tennis parent to walk away with, it’s this: the drills that look the most impressive are often the ones that transfer the least.
The comfortable lie of the feed basket
Picture the classic tennis lesson. A coach stands at the net with a basket of a hundred balls, feeding one forehand after another to the same spot. The player grooves a beautiful, repeatable swing. By the end of the hour the ball is coming back clean and deep, and everyone feels good about the progress.
Then the player walks onto a match court the next weekend and the swing falls apart. The ball never comes to the same place twice. It arrives with spin, with pace, a little late, a little wide. The footwork that never got tested against a real, unpredictable ball suddenly can’t keep up. The lesson looked productive. The match said otherwise.
I’ve watched that gap open up thousands of times, and it’s why one of the six pillars I coach by is Live Ball Is the Method. Live ball means real rallies against a real opponent or a real cooperative partner, not fed balls from a basket and not a machine spitting balls to a marked line. It sounds almost too simple to matter. It’s actually the single biggest lever I have for making practice carry over to competition.
Why the brain needs the mess
There’s good science underneath this, not just coaching folklore. Motor-learning researchers talk about the specificity of practice — the principle that skills are learned in a way that’s tied to the exact conditions they’re practiced under. When you rehearse a stroke in a clean, predictable, closed setting, you get very good at that clean, predictable, closed setting. Change the conditions, and a surprising amount of the skill doesn’t come along for the ride.
A real rally forces a player to do the part that actually wins matches: read the incoming ball, decide, adjust the feet, and only then swing. In a basket feed, the reading and deciding are done for you. You already know where the ball is going. That’s why a player can look flawless in a lesson and lost in a match — the lesson quietly removed the hardest and most important skill, which is coping with a ball you didn’t order.
The United States Tennis Association makes a version of this point in its own player-development guidance, encouraging game-based and play-based practice over isolated repetition, especially for juniors. You can read more about that approach through the USTA’s coaching and player development resources. The research and the governing body both land in the same place: if you want it to show up in a match, practice it in something that looks like a match.
What live ball looks like on a Sarasota court
None of this means practice becomes an unstructured hit-around. Live ball with no design is just recreational tennis, and while there’s a place for that, it isn’t coaching. The craft is building rallies that are real and pointed at a specific skill.
A few examples of what that looks like in my Sarasota groups:
A cross-court rally where both players have to land the ball past the service line, and we count how many in a row they can string together before someone misses or goes short. It’s a real rally — the ball is never the same twice — but it has a target and a score, so the player is learning depth and consistency under live conditions.
A point that always starts with a return of serve, because the return is one of the most-practiced-least strokes in junior tennis. Instead of feeding returns from a basket, we play the point out, so the player learns to return and recover and build, the way a match demands.
An approach-and-finish point where one player is only allowed to win by coming forward. Live ball, real decisions, but the constraint quietly forces hundreds of reps of a skill the player would otherwise avoid.
In every case the ingredients are the same: a genuine rally, a clear target, and a way to keep score. That combination is what turns “just playing” into deliberate practice.
The honesty of a scoreboard
There’s a second reason I lean on live ball, and it’s about confidence rather than technique. When a player hits fifty clean forehands from a basket, the good feeling is real but the evidence is thin, because nothing was contested. When a player wins nine of eleven cross-court rallies against a live partner, that’s evidence they can carry into a real match. It’s earned. I’d rather build a junior’s belief on things they actually did under pressure than on things that felt good in a controlled setting. Confidence built on live reps holds up when the match gets tight. Confidence built on basket feeds tends to evaporate the moment the ball stops cooperating.
The long view
Thirty years in, the temptation for any coach is to run the sessions that look the most like coaching — the crisp feeds, the tidy lines, the impressive-looking technical work. I understand the pull. Parents can see it, players feel productive, and it’s easier to run. But I’ve watched too many technically pretty players come apart in competition to trust the pretty session anymore. The practice that works is often the one that looks a little messy, a little too much like a match, a little too much like the kids are just playing.
So when a Sarasota parent tells me my practice doesn’t look like a lesson, I’ve stopped correcting them. It isn’t supposed to. It’s supposed to look like the thing we’re actually training for. If you want to see how the rest of the six pillars fit together in how I run sessions, you can read more on my coaching page, or reach me directly at michael@srq.tennis or 941-239-4703.
The match is the real test. The least I can do is make practice look it in the eye.