There’s a moment every parent has watched from the fence. Their kid hits a beautiful forehand in the warm-up basket — clean, repeatable, ten in a row to the same spot. Then the match starts, and that same forehand sails long on the first big point. The stroke didn’t disappear. It just never got tested under the conditions that count.
I’m Michael Boothman, and after thirty-plus years coaching juniors here in Sarasota, this gap between “can do it in practice” and “does it in a match” is the single thing I spend the most time closing. The science behind why it happens has a name, and it’s one of the most reliable findings in all of learning research: the testing effect.
What the testing effect actually says
The testing effect — sometimes called retrieval practice — comes out of decades of cognitive science. In plain terms: you learn a skill far more durably by retrieving it under pressure than by repeating it in comfortable conditions. Studying a list of words ten times locks in less than studying it five times and testing yourself five times. The act of pulling the information out, when it’s genuinely difficult to pull, is what builds the durable memory.
That research started with vocabulary and facts, but motor skills follow the same rule. A forehand you’ve fed a hundred balls to, standing in the same spot, hitting to the same target, is a forehand you’ve repeated. A forehand you had to produce on a live ball you didn’t expect, at a moment that mattered, is a forehand you’ve tested. The second one is the one that shows up in a match, because it was built the way matches demand.
If you want to see how the American Development Model frames this same idea — that competition and game-based training belong at the center of development, not tacked on at the end — the USTA and US Olympic committee’s Long-Term Athlete Development framework is worth a read. Different language, same conclusion I reached on the court.
Why this is the whole point of Live Ball Is the Method
One of the Six Pillars I coach by is Live Ball Is the Method — real rallies, not fed balls or machines. People sometimes hear that and assume I’m anti-drilling or anti-repetition. I’m not. Repetition has its place, especially early when a kid is still figuring out where the racquet face needs to point.
But here’s the trap with basket feeding and ball machines: they give you volume without testing. The ball comes to the same place, at the same pace, on a rhythm your body memorizes in about four balls. After that, you’re not retrieving a skill anymore — you’re grooving a pattern that only exists in that exact, artificial condition. It feels productive. The kid looks great. And none of it gets tested against the one variable that defines tennis: an opponent who is actively trying to make the ball hard to hit.
Live ball forces retrieval on every single shot. The ball is a little different every time — different depth, different spin, different angle, arriving when you didn’t quite expect it. Your player has to read it, decide, and produce the stroke under mild uncertainty. That uncertainty isn’t a bug. It’s the entire mechanism. It’s what turns a practiced stroke into a tested one.
What this looks like in a Sarasota session
I don’t ask a junior to hit fifty clean forehands to a cone. I ask them to win a cross-court rally to a target zone, live, against a real hitting partner, and I keep score. Say the drill is: first player to land eight balls in the deep third of the court while rallying live. Now every ball is a test. Miss and you’re behind. That’s a completely different nervous system than feeding to a cone, and it builds a completely different forehand.
The scoring matters more than people think. The moment you put a number on it — eight out of ten to the target, or first to seven in a live game — you’ve converted a practice rep into a test rep. There’s a real consequence, a real retrieval, a real “did it work or not.” That’s also Confidence Is Built, Not Given doing its job: the kid isn’t taking my word that their forehand is match-ready. They just watched it hold up eight times when the point was on the line. That’s evidence, and evidence is what confidence is actually made of.
The uncomfortable part parents should know
Testing yourself feels worse than reviewing. Every student who’s ever crammed knows this — rereading your notes feels smooth and confident, while quizzing yourself feels bumpy and exposes what you don’t know. The bumpy one works better. Every time.
On the court, the same thing is true, and it can be hard to watch. A junior who spent the lesson playing live, competitive, scored points will often look worse than one who spent it grooving pretty forehands off a feed. More errors. More frustration. More moments of “why can’t I do the thing I did five minutes ago in warm-up.” That discomfort is the skill being genuinely tested and genuinely strengthened — not a sign the lesson went badly. If your kid’s practice looks a little messy and competitive rather than clean and rhythmic, that’s usually a good sign, not a bad one.
The flip side is the payoff: a player who trains this way isn’t surprised when the match gets hard, because the match doesn’t feel that different from Tuesday’s practice. They’ve already tested the forehand under pressure a hundred times. The first big point of a tournament isn’t the first time they’ve had to produce that shot when it mattered.
What to do with this
If you’re a parent, you don’t need to run drills — you just need to know what a good session looks like. Ask one question after practice: was there a score? Did points get played, with a consequence, against a real opponent? If the answer is “he hit a lot of balls and looked great,” that’s fine for a warm-up, but it’s not where the durable skill gets built. If the answer is “we kept score and it got competitive,” your kid was being tested, and testing is what sticks.
If you want to see how I build a full development plan around this — layering the right amount of live-ball testing on top of the technical work — that’s the heart of how I structure my coaching here in Sarasota. The short version: the basket teaches the shape of the stroke, but the scoreboard is what teaches it to hold.
The forehand that wins your kid a match in October isn’t the one they groove in August warm-ups. It’s the one they’ve already tested, on purpose, again and again, when a real ball came at them and a real point was on the line.
See you on the court.
— Coach Michael