There is a picture most parents have in their heads of what good practice looks like: a player standing in one spot, hitting the same crosscourt forehand forty times in a row until it looks clean. It feels productive. The strokes start to match by rep twenty, and everyone leaves feeling like work got done.
I am Michael Boothman, a USPTA Elite Professional and the founder of SRQ Tennis here in Sarasota, and after thirty years on the court I will tell you the uncomfortable part: that groove usually does not survive contact with a match. The player who looked so smooth feeding the same ball falls apart the moment the ball comes back a little higher, a little wider, or a little later than the last one. The stroke was real. The adaptability was never built.
The problem with grooving
When a player repeats the exact same shot over and over, the brain gets to reuse the same solution. It does not have to plan the movement fresh each time, because nothing changed. That feels like mastery in the moment. What it actually produces is a shot that only works under the one condition it was rehearsed in.
Tennis never gives you that one condition. Every ball arrives with a slightly different speed, spin, height, and depth. A stroke that has only ever been grooved against a machine-perfect feed has no experience solving those tiny variations, so the first unexpected ball exposes it.
This is why the second of our Six Pillars is Live Ball Is the Method. The majority of court time at SRQ Tennis is spent in real rallies, not fed balls, precisely because live ball forces the player to meet a new problem on every single shot. The variety is not a distraction from learning the stroke. The variety is the learning.
What the research actually says
This is not a hunch. Motor-learning researchers have studied it for decades under the name “variability of practice,” and the finding is consistent and slightly counterintuitive: practice that is more varied tends to produce worse results during the practice session and better results when it counts — in a new situation, days later.
The classic version of this is the contrast between blocked practice (same shot, over and over) and random practice (shots mixed up so you rarely hit the same one twice). Blocked practice looks better on the day. Random practice transfers better to competition and holds up longer. The USTA’s coaching materials lean on the same body of work; you can read more through the USTA, which builds its junior development guidance around evidence like this rather than around what merely looks tidy in a lesson.
The reason is simple once you sit with it. When practice is varied, the brain cannot coast on a copied answer. It has to re-plan the movement every rep — read the incoming ball, choose a response, execute. That extra planning work is exactly the skill a match demands, so training it directly is what makes the stroke portable.
What variety looks like on a Sarasota court
Variety does not mean chaos, and it does not mean a player never gets to feel a clean rep. Early on, when someone is first meeting a shape they have never made before, a little repetition helps them find the feeling. The mistake is staying there.
Here is roughly how I build variety into a junior’s forehand instead of grooving it:
- Vary the target, not just the ball. Same feed, but the player alternates deep crosscourt, short angle, and down the line on a called cue. The stroke stays; the decision changes.
- Vary the incoming ball. Mix a low slice, a high heavy ball, and a flat drive so the player has to adjust contact point and swing path instead of repeating one.
- Vary the pressure. Move from a cooperative rally into a live-ball game where the point actually matters. The stroke has to survive a scoreboard.
Notice that none of this is a machine spitting identical balls to a stationary player. Every version asks the junior to solve something. By the end of a block, they have not hit one shot two hundred times — they have solved two hundred slightly different problems, which is what a match is.
Why it is worth the messier-looking practice
I want to be honest with parents about the trade, because it matters. Varied practice looks worse while it is happening. Your child will miss more in a random block than in a grooved one. The rally will break down more often. If you judge the session by how clean it looked, you will conclude the grooved day was better.
It was not. It just felt better. The grooved player peaks in the drill and fades in the match. The player who trained variety looks a little rougher on Tuesday and then holds up on Saturday when the ball comes at them in a way no one rehearsed. That gap — between looking good in practice and playing well in a match — is one of the biggest things I watch for, and varied practice is one of the most reliable ways to close it.
This connects to how we track progress, too. Because varied practice suppresses the in-session polish, you cannot judge it by how the last rally looked. You judge it by whether the player can hit a target under live, game-like conditions — eight out of ten to a spot in a real rally, not off a cooperative feed. That standard is the whole point of our first pillar, Accuracy Inside Representative Conditions, and it is why we measure with numbers instead of vibes.
What this means for you as a parent
You do not need to run drills at home. What helps most is understanding the trade, so a messy-looking practice does not make you think something is going wrong. When your junior comes off the court having missed a lot in a live-ball game, that is often the session that is building the most.
If you want to see how this fits into the larger way we develop players in Sarasota, our coaching approach lays out the full Six Pillars and how they connect. The short version: we would rather build a player who can solve a new ball than one who looks perfect solving the same old one.
That is the difference between a stroke that photographs well and a game that travels. Grooving builds the first. Variety builds the second. In a sport that never hands you the same ball twice, only the second one wins matches.
If you have a junior in the Sarasota area and want to talk about how this looks for your specific player, you can reach me directly at 941-239-4703 or michael@srq.tennis.
— Coach Michael