Ask most parents watching a Sarasota junior match what separates the kid who looks smooth from the kid who always seems a step late, and they’ll point to the strokes. Michael Boothman has spent 30-plus years on public courts here, and he’ll tell you it’s almost never the strokes. It’s the feet—and more specifically, the small hop that happens a fraction of a second before the opponent hits the ball. That hop is the split-step, and it’s the first piece of footwork Michael teaches, before a single junior swings at a moving target.
The split-step looks like nothing. A player rises slightly onto the balls of the feet, spreads the stance a touch wider than shoulder width, and lands lightly just as the opponent makes contact. But that tiny, well-timed landing is what lets the body push off in any direction without a wasted step. Skip it, and the player is flat-footed at the exact moment they need to move. Time it well, and the first step toward the ball is already loaded.
Why the small hop does so much
The reason the split-step works comes down to how muscles produce force. When you land from that little hop, the muscles in your legs stretch under load for a split second and then contract—what sports scientists call the stretch-shortening cycle. It’s the same mechanism that lets you jump higher after a quick dip than from a dead stall. Landing at the right instant stores a little elastic energy the player can immediately turn into a push toward the ball. Land too early and that energy leaks away before it’s useful; don’t split at all and there’s nothing stored to begin with.
This is why the split-step lives inside the pillar Michael calls Movement & Conditioning in the Right Order. In the SRQ Tennis approach, footwork isn’t a bolt-on you add once the forehand looks good. Movement gets built in a deliberate sequence—joint preparation, then muscle activation, then the high-intensity, reactive work—and the split-step sits right at the reactive end. A junior who has warmed up properly and learned to load the ground can react; a cold, flat-footed junior is guessing. The order matters as much as the drill.
The timing piece is what makes it hard, and it’s worth being honest about that with players and parents. The split-step isn’t a hop you do on a metronome. It’s a hop you time to the opponent, which means the player has to be reading the other person’s swing, not their own internal count. That’s a reading skill as much as a movement skill, and it only develops when a real ball is coming from a real hitter.
A live-ball drill that builds it
Here’s a drill Michael runs with Sarasota juniors that trains the split-step without turning it into a robotic exercise. The whole thing is done with a live rally partner, because a split-step timed to a ball machine’s fixed rhythm doesn’t transfer to a human opponent who disguises and varies contact.
Start with the two players rallying cross-court, relaxed pace, cooperative. The coach or the hitting player gives one instruction to the working junior: land your split-step the moment you hear the strings. Not before, not after—on contact. For the first few minutes that’s the entire focus. Ignore where the ball goes. Ignore whether the shot is pretty. The junior’s only job is to sync that landing to the sound and sight of the partner’s hit, over and over, until it stops feeling like a separate task.
Once the timing settles in, add a light reactive layer. The feeding partner starts placing balls slightly wider—a step to the forehand, a step to the backhand—so the junior has to split, read direction, and push off. Keep the pace honest and rally-like; the point is not to run the kid ragged but to prove to them that a well-timed split gets them to a wider ball they’d otherwise have chased. When a junior feels that difference themselves, you rarely have to nag them about footwork again.
I’ll usually run this in short blocks—a few minutes on, a short reset, a few minutes on—rather than one long grind. Reactive footwork is quality work, and quality fades fast when a Sarasota junior is tired and sweating through a July afternoon. Better to get twenty sharp split-steps than eighty sloppy ones.
What to watch for
A few things tell you whether the split-step is actually landing where it should. The stance should widen on the landing, not narrow—a junior who brings the feet together has it backwards. The landing should be quiet and light, on the balls of the feet, not a heavy two-footed thud. And the timing should track the opponent’s contact, which you can check simply by watching the player’s feet and the partner’s racquet at the same time: they should sync up. If the hop is consistently landing after the ball is already struck, the player is reacting to the ball’s flight instead of anticipating contact, and the drill needs to slow down until the read is clean.
Parents can watch for the same cues from the fence. You don’t need to coach it—please don’t coach it from the sideline—but if you notice your junior moving more smoothly to wide balls after a few weeks, the split-step is very likely the reason. It’s one of the least glamorous things in tennis and one of the highest-return.
The USTA’s player-development resources cover footwork fundamentals in more depth for parents who want to read further; you can start with the material at USTA Player Development. And if you want to see how footwork fits into the larger development sequence we use, the coaching page lays out how movement, technique, and live-ball work stack together.
None of this is exotic. The split-step has been in the game for decades. But teaching it first, timing it to a real opponent, and building it in the right order is what turns it from a piece of trivia into a habit that shows up in a match. That’s the whole idea—small, specific, evidence-backed things done in the right sequence, until the junior owns them.
If you’ve got a young player in Sarasota who always seems a half-step late, this is where I’d start.