Most people assume the hard part of running a tennis program is the tennis. It isn’t. Michael Boothman has coached in Sarasota for more than 30 years, and the tennis — the drills, the corrections, the strokes — was the part he already knew. The part he had to learn was everything that surrounds it: keeping a small business honest, keeping promises to parents who are trusting you with their kids and their money, and figuring out what “getting better” actually means when someone is paying you to deliver it.
Here’s the thing nobody tells you when you start a coaching business. The moment a parent hands you a check, vague gets expensive. “Your daughter is really improving” is easy to say on a Tuesday. It is a lot harder to say in March when the family is deciding whether to re-enroll and wants to know what six months of lessons actually bought them. Running the business forced me to answer that question with something real. That pressure — the good kind of pressure — is where a lot of my coaching philosophy actually came from.
The business made the coaching more honest
When you coach as a hobby or a favor, you can coast on encouragement. Nobody is auditing you. But when families are paying premium prices for small-group sessions, they deserve to know their kid is getting somewhere, and “trust me” is not a good enough answer. So I started tracking things. Not everything — just the things that matter and that a ten-year-old can feel proud of.
That habit grew straight into one of the Six Pillars I coach by today: Confidence Is Built, Not Given. The idea is simple. You don’t hand a kid confidence by telling them they’re great. You build it with evidence they can point to. When a player can say “in April I hit 4 out of 10 forehands to the deep corner, and now I hit 8 out of 10,” that’s confidence with a foundation under it. It doesn’t wash away the first time they lose a match, because it isn’t based on my opinion of them. It’s based on something they did, that they watched happen, that they can repeat.
I did not invent that from a textbook. I backed into it because running a business meant I had to prove value, and the most honest way to prove value is a number that went up.
Why I stopped selling outcomes I couldn’t control
Early on, like a lot of small business owners, I was tempted to promise big. Parents respond to big promises. But 30 years in, I’ve watched enough juniors come through Sarasota to know that no coach controls whether a kid makes varsity, wins a tournament, or plays in college. Too many things sit outside the court — genetics, growth spurts, how much a kid actually wants it, whether life gets in the way.
What a coach can control is the quality of the work and whether it’s measured honestly. So that’s what SRQ Tennis sells now: good reps in the right conditions, tracked with real numbers, in groups small enough that every player gets seen. Six players max, on public courts, no exceptions. I would rather under-promise and let the progress reports do the talking than sell a dream I can’t guarantee. It’s a slower way to grow a business. It’s also the only version I can look a parent in the eye about.
Small groups are a business decision and a coaching decision
People sometimes ask why I cap groups at six when eight or ten would obviously make more money per session. It’s a fair question — the math is not subtle. But the cap is where my business sense and my coaching sense finally agreed on something.
If I’m going to track every player’s numbers and actually coach the contact point instead of shouting general encouragement across a full court, I need to be able to see all of them. Past six, I can’t. The reps get thinner, the feedback gets vaguer, and the thing I’m charging for quietly stops happening. So the cap protects the product. It’s a business constraint that exists to keep a coaching promise. That’s the kind of overlap I never expected when I started, and now it’s non-negotiable.
Running the numbers taught me to trust the process, not the mood
There’s a version of coaching that runs on vibes — the coach feels like it was a good session, the kid feels tired, everyone goes home. Running a business breaks you of that fast, because moods are not something you can put in a progress report or build a re-enrollment on.
When you have to write down what happened, you start noticing that the days that felt great and the days that actually moved a number aren’t always the same days. A session can feel exhausting and productive and still not budge a player’s accuracy under pressure. That taught me to design practice around the conditions that transfer to matches — live, competitive, game-like — rather than the drills that just feel busy. If you want to see how that plays out on the court, my coaching approach is built entirely around that idea.
The research backs this up, too. The principle that skills learned under match-like conditions transfer better than skills grooved in easy, repetitive settings is well established in motor-learning literature, and it’s part of why professional coaching bodies like the USPTA emphasize ongoing education for coaches rather than a one-and-done certification. Coaching is a craft you keep refining. Running a business just makes the feedback loop faster, because the market tells you quickly when you’ve stopped delivering.
What I’d tell another coach starting out
If you’re a coach thinking about hanging your own shingle in Sarasota or anywhere else, here’s the short version of what the business taught me. Charge fairly, then over-deliver on the thing you actually promised. Track something real so you never have to bluff about progress. Keep your groups small enough that you can coach them, even when a bigger number would pay better this month. And be honest about what you can’t control — parents trust the coach who tells them the truth more than the one who tells them what they want to hear.
Thirty years in, the business and the coaching have stopped being two separate jobs. Keeping the business honest is what keeps the coaching honest. You can read more about how I got here on my about page — but the short version is that the pressure to prove value, week after week, made me a better coach than I would have been coasting on encouragement.
If you’re a parent trying to figure out whether a program is actually delivering, ask for the numbers. Any coach worth their court fee should be able to show you.
— Michael Boothman