Most junior players I watch in Sarasota can hit a deep ball. What they can’t do is hit a deep ball on the seventh shot of a rally when their legs are tired and the ball is landing short and skidding. Those are two different skills, and only one of them wins matches.
I’m Michael Boothman. I’ve coached in Sarasota for over thirty years, and if I had to point at the single most reliable difference between a junior who wins and a junior who almost wins, it’s rally depth under fatigue. Not power. Not a prettier forehand. Depth, held for a whole point, on both wings, when it’s uncomfortable.
Here’s the drill I use for it, and why it’s built the way it is.
Why depth matters more than juniors think
Depth is the cheapest form of pressure in tennis. A ball that lands inside the service line gives your opponent time, court position, and options. A ball that lands within four feet of the baseline takes all three away — and the player receiving it hits their next shot moving backward, off balance, from behind the baseline.
You don’t have to hit harder to do this. You have to hit with enough net clearance and enough shape that the ball carries. Juniors resist that, because a flat ball skimming the tape feels like the aggressive shot. It usually isn’t. It’s the shot with the smallest margin and the shortest landing zone.
The USTA’s junior development guidance has said versions of this for years: build the ability to control the ball’s landing area first, then add pace. You can read more about their player development framework at usta.com.
The pillar this drill lives under
This is Pillar One of my coaching philosophy: Accuracy Inside Representative Conditions.
The idea is simple and it’s the thing most practice gets wrong. Accuracy built in easy conditions doesn’t survive hard ones. A player who can hit ten deep balls from a coach’s feed has proven that they can hit deep balls from a coach’s feed. That is not the same as proving they can hit them in a live rally, off an awkward bounce, when the score matters.
So the standard is specific. I want 8 out of 10 balls to the target inside a live drill — live meaning a real rally, real opponent, unpredictable ball. That’s the 85/100 Rule in practice: if a skill isn’t holding up around 85 percent of the time in representative conditions, it isn’t ready to be trusted in a match, and adding more speed to it is just building on sand.
This drill is designed so the accuracy standard and the pressure arrive at the same time. That pairs directly with Live Ball Is the Method — the second pillar. No baskets. No machine. Real rallies, because a rally is the thing we’re actually training for.
The Depth Game — how to run it
Setup: Two players, cross-court. Tape or cones marking a depth zone from the service line to the baseline — but the scoring zone is the back half of that, from roughly halfway between the service line and baseline back to the baseline. Call it the deep box.
The rules:
- Rally cross-court only. Start with a hand-fed rally ball, not a serve.
- Every ball that lands in the deep box scores 1 point for the player who hit it.
- Every ball that lands short of the deep box but still in scores 0 — no penalty, but no credit.
- Every error is minus 1.
- First player to 15 wins the game. Play three games. Switch to the other diagonal for games four through six.
Why it’s scored this way: short balls don’t cost you anything directly, which sounds soft. But your opponent is scoring off your short balls because they get an easier ball to drive deep. The punishment is indirect and realistic — exactly how it works in a match.
The minus-1 for errors is the part that keeps this honest. Without it, players just swing bigger to chase depth. With it, they have to find the version of the shot that’s both deep and repeatable, which is the whole point. That usually means more net clearance — I’ll often ask for a ball that crosses at least three feet over the tape, and juniors are always surprised by how much deeper the ball lands with almost no change in swing speed.
The variation I use when a player has plateaued: cap the games at 4 minutes instead of 15 points. Fatigue changes everything. A player at 90 seconds and a player at 3:30 are different players, and the second one is the one who shows up in the third set at Payne Park in August.
What to watch for
Three things tell me whether the drill is doing its job.
Contact height. Players chasing depth often let the ball drop too low and then have to lift with the wrist. If contact is dropping, the footwork is late, not the technique. That’s a Movement & Conditioning in the Right Order problem, not a stroke problem, and I’ll fix the split step before I touch the swing.
Net clearance consistency. If the clearance is bouncing between one foot and six feet, the player is guessing. That’s a Technique Is Geometry issue — center contact and a square face at impact produce a repeatable trajectory. Off-center contact produces a lottery.
What happens after an error. This is the one parents rarely notice. Watch the ten seconds after a player loses a point to a bad miss. The player who resets, walks to the back fence, and starts the next ball clean is building something. The player who rushes into the next rally still annoyed is practicing being annoyed. That’s Channel the Fire — the competitive heat is fine, it’s fuel, but it needs a routine attached to it.
How to know it’s working
Don’t track “did it feel better.” Track the number.
Run the drill Monday. Count how many of the player’s first 20 rally balls land in the deep box. Write it down. Run it again Thursday and Sunday. If the number moves from 9 to 12 to 14 over two weeks, the player has evidence — real evidence, their own numbers — that the skill is improving.
That matters more than it sounds. Confidence Is Built, Not Given is the fourth pillar, and it means exactly this: you can’t talk a junior into believing in their forehand. You can show them a tally sheet where the deep-ball count climbed from 9 to 14 while they were tired, and let them draw their own conclusion. That belief holds up in a tiebreak. Encouragement doesn’t.
A note for parents
If your junior is running this at a public court on their own with a friend, that’s ideal — it’s a two-player drill with no coach required. What they’ll need help with is the counting. Ask them for the number when they come off the court, not “how did it go.” The number is the conversation.
If you want more on how I structure junior development around evidence rather than encouragement, there’s more detail on my coaching page.
Twenty minutes, two players, one strip of tape. There’s no shortcut in it and there’s nothing clever about it. It just works, and the players who run it in July are the ones who look different in October.
— Michael Boothman, USPTA Elite Professional, SRQ Tennis, Sarasota FL