Summer camp is winding down, school is about to start, and every year around this time I get the same question from Sarasota parents: “Is my kid ready to play a tournament?” It’s a fair question, and the honest answer is usually “sooner than you think, and for different reasons than you’d expect.” I’m Michael Boothman — I’ve coached juniors here in Sarasota for more than 30 years — and I want to walk you through what fall tournament season actually looks like for a first-time family, so the whole thing feels less like a leap off a cliff and more like the next natural step.
Fall is a good season to start. The brutal summer heat is easing, the courts are less crowded once the seasonal crowd thins out, and the fall junior calendar has enough low-stakes events that a nervous ten-year-old can dip a toe in without being thrown into the deep end. You don’t have to wait until your child is “good enough.” Competing is part of getting good, not a reward for already being there.
What tournaments are actually for
Here’s the reframe I give every parent: the first tournament is not about the result. It’s about exposure. Your child needs to feel what it’s like to hold a lead and lose it, to shank an easy ball on a big point, to shake hands after a tough loss and mean it. None of that shows up in a practice session, no matter how well-run. You can’t rehearse nerves. You can only meet them.
That’s why I lean on the sixth of our six coaching pillars — Channel the Fire — more in tournament prep than almost anywhere else. Competitive frustration is not a problem to be stamped out; it’s fuel. The kids who succeed long-term aren’t the ones who never get rattled. They’re the ones who learn to do something useful with the rattle. The tool we teach for that is the Between-Point Routine, or BPR: breathe, cue, target, visualize, go. It’s a simple five-step reset a player runs in the fifteen or twenty seconds between points — a way to let the last point go and give the next one a clean start. A junior who has drilled the BPR in practice walks onto a tournament court with something to do with their nerves instead of just feeling them.
Where Sarasota juniors play
You don’t need to drive to Orlando for your child’s first event. The greater Sarasota area has a solid base of courts and a healthy junior scene once you know where to look.
For everyday practice and building match reps, our own programs run at Potter Park and Pineview, both public-park settings that keep the vibe low-pressure and the groups small. Lakewood Ranch to the east has grown into a real junior hub over the last few years, with more court availability and more families playing than almost anywhere else in the region. And plenty of Sarasota juniors get their first taste of organized competition through community events and beginner-level ladders before they ever enter a sanctioned tournament.
When your child is ready for official events, the sanctioning body to know is USTA Florida. Their junior tournament schedule is searchable by age division and skill level, and the entry-level events (often called Novice or Level 7) are specifically designed for kids playing their first competitive matches. Start there. There’s no prize for skipping the beginner rung and getting demolished at a level above your child’s head.
How to read “ready”
Parents tend to gauge readiness by whether their child can win. I gauge it differently. I ask three things:
Can they keep a live-ball rally going under a little pressure? Not a perfect rally — just enough control to play a real point instead of a coin flip. This is why so much of our training is live ball rather than feeding balls from a basket; matches are live ball, so practice should be too.
Can they run a between-point routine without me reminding them? If the BPR is automatic in practice, it’ll hold up (mostly) under tournament stress.
And can they lose a practice set without falling apart? If a tough training loss already sends them into a spiral, a tournament loss will too — and that’s fine, it just means we spend a few more weeks building that muscle before entering an event.
Notice that none of those three is “can they win.” Winning is an output. Those three are the inputs, and they’re all trainable.
The parent’s job on tournament day
This might be the most important part, so I’ll be direct: on match day, your job is smaller than you think, and it matters more than you think.
Feed them, get them there early enough to warm up without rushing, and then get out of the sightline. Juniors play tenser when they’re scanning the fence for a parent’s reaction after every point. The single most valuable thing you can say on the ride home is nothing about the score. Ask what was fun. Ask what was hard. Let them bring up the tennis if they want to. I’ve watched more junior careers stall from a well-meaning ride-home breakdown of every missed backhand than from anything that happened on the court.
If you want the longer version of how we think about the parent’s role and the development path we use, that’s laid out on our coaching page. And if you’re weighing whether your child is ready for the more individualized attention of private work versus group training, that’s worth a conversation — every kid is on a different clock.
Start small, stay patient
The goal of fall tournament season for a first-timer is not a trophy. It’s three or four events where your child competes, feels the nerves, runs their routine, and comes off the court still wanting to play next weekend. That’s a win by every measure that matters at ten, twelve, or fourteen years old.
Sarasota is a good place to do this. The courts are here, the events are here, and the fall weather finally cooperates. If you’re not sure where your child fits or which event to enter first, that’s exactly the kind of thing I’m happy to help sort out — reach me at 941-239-4703 or michael@srq.tennis, and we’ll find the right starting line.
See you on the court, Coach Michael Boothman