Watch two juniors of roughly equal skill play a point, and you can usually tell within a few shots which one is the better mover. But here is the part most people get wrong: the better mover is rarely faster. Michael Boothman has spent more than thirty years coaching in Sarasota, and the pattern is consistent. The player who always seems to have time is not quicker off the mark—they simply started moving earlier. They read the ball before it left the other racquet.
That skill has a name in the motor-learning world: anticipation. It is one of the most researched and least coached parts of the junior game, and it is worth understanding because it changes how you spend practice time.
Speed is not the bottleneck
When a junior gets stretched wide and shanks a ball, the instinct—from parents and a lot of coaches—is to talk about footwork. Get to it faster. Smaller steps. More energy. Sometimes that is the real problem. But often the player did not arrive late because they were slow. They arrived late because they left late.
The tennis ball crosses the net in a fraction of a second. If a player waits until the ball is on their side to decide where it is going, there is no amount of foot speed that buys back the time they lost. The decision has to happen earlier—during the opponent’s swing, sometimes before it. Skilled players pick up cues from the hitter’s shoulders, hips, and racquet path, and they start their preparation off those cues rather than off the ball itself. Research on expert racket-sport players shows exactly this: the difference between advanced and developing players is not reaction speed but how early and how accurately they read the information in front of them. The United States Tennis Association’s player-development resources make the same point—perception and decision-making are trainable skills, not fixed traits (USTA).
The encouraging part is that anticipation is learnable. But it can only be learned under one condition.
This is why Live Ball Is the Method
One of the six pillars I coach by is Live Ball Is the Method—the idea that real rallies, not fed balls or machines, are where most learning has to happen. Anticipation is the clearest example of why that pillar exists.
A ball machine fires from the same spot, at the same pace, on the same timer. There is no shoulder turn to read, no grip change, no disguise, no hesitation. It is excellent for grooving a stroke and terrible for teaching a player to read an opponent, because there is nothing to read. A junior can spend an hour on a machine, hit five hundred clean forehands, and walk off having practiced zero anticipation. The information that skilled anticipation depends on—another human being’s body winding up to strike—was never present.
Live ball puts that information back. When a junior rallies against another player, every incoming ball is preceded by cues: how the opponent set up, whether they were rushed, where their racquet face pointed. At first the junior ignores all of it and reacts to the ball late, like everyone does. But with enough live repetitions, the brain starts to link those early cues to what happens next. The player begins leaving earlier without being told to. That is anticipation being built, quietly, rep by rep. You cannot install it with an instruction. You can only create the conditions where it develops.
What this looks like in a Sarasota session
I do not tell a ten-year-old to “read the ball better.” That is a result, not a cue, and telling a player to produce a result they do not yet know how to produce just makes them anxious. Instead I set up live-ball games that reward early reading and quietly punish late reading, then let the player figure out the rest.
A simple one: cooperative cross-court rallies where the only rule is that you must be turned—shoulders rotated, racquet back—before the ball crosses the net. Not after it bounces. Before it crosses. Miss that checkpoint and the point does not count, even if you make the shot. Suddenly the player has a reason to watch the opponent’s swing instead of waiting for the ball, because the checkpoint arrives too fast otherwise. Within a couple of sessions, the early turn stops being a rule they are following and starts being a habit they own.
Another: play out points where I occasionally telegraph my shot with an obvious body cue, and the junior’s job is to call “left” or “right” out loud during my swing, before I make contact. Get it right and they are already moving. Get it wrong and they feel exactly how much time a bad read costs. We are training their eyes to hunt for information in the right place, and we are doing it inside a real point, which is the only place the skill will ever be used.
Neither of these is fancy. That is the point. Anticipation does not come from a drill you buy; it comes from live repetition against a real opponent, structured so the player has a reason to look early.
What parents can watch for
If you want to see whether your junior is developing this, forget the scoreline for a moment and watch their preparation. Are they turning and getting the racquet back while the ball is still on the opponent’s side of the net? Or are they waiting, flat-footed, until the ball has bounced on their side and then scrambling? Early preparation is the visible fingerprint of good anticipation. It shows up long before it shows up on the scoreboard.
You will also notice something calmer about a player who reads early. They look less hurried, less panicked, more like they have time—because they do. They made themselves time by starting sooner.
That calm is not a personality trait. It is a trained skill, and it is one more reason the court time your junior spends should be spent playing, not feeding. If you want to see how this fits into the rest of how we develop players in Sarasota, our coaching approach walks through the full picture.
Anticipation is not the flashiest thing to work on. No one posts a highlight of a well-timed shoulder turn. But over a season it is the difference between a junior who always seems rushed and one who always seems to have time—and that difference is built one live ball at a time.
Michael Boothman is a USPTA Elite Professional and the founder of SRQ Tennis in Sarasota, Florida. Reach him at 941-239-4703 or michael@srq.tennis.