Most junior players I meet in Sarasota can hit a decent serve on an empty court. They can also hit a decent forehand when a coach feeds them a ball at a comfortable pace. What far fewer of them can do is connect those two shots under any pressure — serve, recover, read the return, and put the next ball somewhere useful. That gap between “I have the shots” and “I can string them together when it counts” is where a lot of match losses actually live.
I’m Michael Boothman, a USPTA Elite Professional and the founder of SRQ Tennis here in Sarasota. After thirty-plus years on court, the drill I keep coming back to for closing that gap is one of the simplest patterns in the sport: serve plus one. It’s not flashy. It won’t look impressive to a parent watching from the fence. But it teaches the thing that matches actually reward — connecting shots in sequence, live, against a real ball coming back.
Why the first two shots decide so much
Watch junior points closely and a pattern shows up fast: an enormous share of them are decided within the first two or three balls. The serve and the shot right after it — the “plus one” — do a huge amount of the work. If a player can serve to a spot and then reliably attack or control the return, they’re winning a lot of points before a rally ever develops. If they serve well but then flail at the first ball back, all that serve practice leaks away.
This is exactly why I don’t love isolated serve baskets. A junior can stand at the baseline and pound fifty serves into the box, feel great about it, and still fall apart the moment a ball comes back at them. The serve was never the whole skill. The skill is the serve and what you do next, built together.
That’s the heart of the second of our Six Pillars at SRQ Tennis — Live Ball Is the Method. Skills that get built in live, ball-coming-back conditions transfer to matches. Skills built in isolation, off a feed or a cone, often don’t. The research on this is consistent: practice that resembles the conditions of performance produces learning that holds up when it counts. The USTA’s player development materials make the same case for game-based, competitive practice over rote repetition (USTA Player Development). Serve plus one is one of the cleanest ways to honor that principle without overcomplicating things.
The drill, step by step
Here’s how I run it with juniors. You need two players and a court. No basket required — that’s the point.
Setup. One player serves, one player returns. The server’s job is not just to get the serve in. It’s to serve to a called target — say, out wide in the deuce court — and then be ready for the return. The returner plays the point out normally from there.
The scoring twist. The server only wins full credit for the point if two things happen: the serve lands in the called zone, and the plus-one ball (their first shot after the serve) lands in the target area we’ve agreed on for that pattern. Win the point some other way and it still counts on the scoreboard, but it doesn’t count toward the pattern goal we’re tracking.
The pattern goal. We pick one pattern and stick with it for a block. A common one: serve out wide, then hit the plus-one forehand crosscourt into the open court the wide serve just created. The server is learning to see the space the serve opens and step into it — not to hit a highlight winner, but to hit the geometrically obvious ball to the right place.
The number. I want to see 8 out of 10 plus-one balls land in the target zone under these live conditions before we call the pattern solid. That’s the 85/100 Rule we use across the program — accuracy proven inside representative conditions, not off a friendly feed. Eight out of ten when a real ball is coming back is worth far more than twenty in a row off a basket.
Rotate servers every ten serves so nobody’s arm gets cooked and both players get reps on both sides of the pattern.
What to actually coach while it’s running
The temptation is to talk constantly. Resist it. The drill teaches most of the lesson on its own — the player finds out immediately whether the serve set up the plus-one or not. My job is to point at the contact and the space, not to narrate the swing.
Two cues do most of the work:
“Serve to open the court, not to end it.” Juniors often try to ace every serve, which leaves them off balance for the next ball. A serve placed to a spot — even at 70 percent pace — that pulls the returner wide is worth more than a bigger serve hit nowhere in particular. The serve is a setup shot as much as a weapon.
“Recover to where the next ball is going, not to the middle out of habit.” After a wide serve, the smart recovery position isn’t dead center — it’s shaded to cover the most likely return and ready to step into the plus-one. This is where footwork and pattern awareness meet.
If a player keeps missing the plus-one long or into the net, I don’t add three new instructions. I look at the contact point. Usually they’re reaching or rushing because the serve pulled them out of position too. Fix the serve target and the recovery, and the plus-one often cleans itself up. That’s Technique Is Geometry in practice — a good ball is mostly a good contact point in the right place, not a longer checklist of swing thoughts.
Progressions once the base pattern holds
Once a player is hitting 8 of 10 on the serve-wide-plus-one-crosscourt pattern, layer it up:
- Add a second pattern. Serve down the T, plus-one behind the returner. Now the server has to read which pattern the situation gives them.
- Let the returner fight back. Tell the returner to specifically try to take the plus-one ball early and flip the point. Now the server is executing the pattern against genuine resistance, which is exactly what a match delivers.
- Play games to seven. Server has to complete the pattern to earn the point. First to seven. Suddenly there’s a scoreboard, a little pressure, and the pattern gets stress-tested — which is the whole idea.
Each step keeps the ball live and keeps the stakes closer to a real match. That’s the ladder I want, not more reps in a vacuum.
The point for parents
If you’re watching your junior do this drill in Sarasota this summer or heading into the fall season, here’s what “good” looks like: it will not look like a clinic full of clean, pretty winners. It’ll look like two kids grinding through patterns, missing some, adjusting, and slowly getting the serve and the next ball to work together. That struggle is the learning. A drill that looks perfect usually isn’t teaching much.
Serve plus one is a small thing that changes a lot. It takes the two most important shots in any point and makes players build them as one connected skill, under the only conditions that matter — a real ball coming back. If you want to see how this fits into the way we build players across the board, take a look at how we coach at SRQ Tennis.
Give your player two weeks of honest serve-plus-one work heading into fall. Track the eight-out-of-ten. You’ll see it show up in matches long before anything else does.
— Coach Michael Boothman michael@srq.tennis · 941-239-4703