Ask a room full of junior players what shot scares them and you will hear the same answer over and over: the overhead. It looks simple from the stands — ball goes up, ball comes down, hit it hard. On the court it is one of the most rushed, mistimed strokes in the game. After thirty years of coaching in Sarasota, I can tell you the overhead is not a power problem. It is a spacing and confidence problem, and both of those are trainable.
I am Michael Boothman, a USPTA Elite Professional and the founder of SRQ Tennis here in Sarasota. This is a drill I run with juniors across every level, from the 10-and-under group at Potter Park to players getting ready for high school tryouts. It is built on one of our Six Pillars — Live Ball Is the Method — and it fixes the overhead by putting it back into the rallies where it actually happens.
Why the overhead falls apart
Most juniors learn the overhead the wrong way. A coach stands at the net and tosses a soft, floating lob straight overhead. The player sets, swings, and connects. Feels great. Then a match comes, the opponent throws up a deep, spinning defensive lob into the sun, and the whole thing collapses. Late footwork, contact behind the head, ball into the back fence.
The gap is not technique. It is that the practiced overhead never resembled the real one. A fed lob comes from the wrong place, at the wrong speed, with the player already planted and waiting. A real lob comes off a scramble, forces the player to turn and track a moving ball, and demands footwork before the swing ever starts.
This is the whole idea behind Live Ball Is the Method: the majority of court time should be spent in real rallies, not off fed balls or a machine. When you train a shot inside the conditions it will face, the skill transfers. When you train it in a sterile, predictable feed, it stays on the practice court. The guidance on practice and instruction from the USTA has said this for years — the body learns what you actually rehearse.
The drill: Lob-and-Chase
Here is the structure. It takes two players, or a player and a coach willing to move.
Setup. Player A starts at the baseline. Player B (or the coach) starts at the net with a basket of balls but does not feed from a static position. Instead, B feeds a normal groundstroke to start a live point.
The trigger. At any point in the rally, B lifts a lob — sometimes short, sometimes deep, sometimes to the backhand side, never announced. Player A has to recognize it, turn sideways, move back with a shuffle or crossover step, and hit the overhead in balance. The point is live. If A puts the overhead away, great. If B gets it back, they keep playing.
The constraint that makes it work. Player A does not get to camp under the ball and wait. Because the lob is disguised inside a real rally, the first move is always footwork. That is the piece a fed lob never trains.
Run it in blocks of ten. Track how many of the ten overheads land in the court under control — not how many were crushed. A junior who hits eight of ten deep, controlled overheads under live pressure has a weapon. A junior who hits three winners and dumps seven has a liability. This is our fourth pillar in action — Confidence Is Built, Not Given — you earn belief in the shot from the number on the board, not from a coach saying “nice one.”
Coaching cues that actually help
When I run Lob-and-Chase, I keep the talking short. Three cues do most of the work:
Point at the ball. The non-hitting hand comes up and tracks the ball down. This turns the shoulders automatically and gives the eyes a steady reference. It is the single fastest fix for late contact.
Get behind it, then step in. Juniors drift under the ball and end up hitting off their back foot. The move is back first, then forward through contact. If the feet finish moving backward, the overhead sails.
Contact out front, arm long. Not behind the head. A tall, out-front contact point with a square racquet face keeps the ball down. This is the same geometry that governs every stroke — center contact and a square face — just applied over your head instead of in front of you.
Scaling it up and down
For younger players at Potter Park, I shorten the court and take the sun and the wind out of it by turning them to hit crosscourt. The lobs are gentler, but they are still live and still disguised. The goal at that age is simply to turn, move back, and make contact in balance — placement over power, every time.
For players heading into tryout season, I make it harder. B throws in higher, deeper lobs and mixes in the occasional short one to force the read. Sometimes I have the hitter play the point out after the overhead so they learn to recover and close, because in a real match the overhead is rarely the last ball. That full sequence — read, move, strike, recover — is what a match actually asks for.
Why this matters right now
School is about to start, summer volume is winding down, and fall junior tournaments are around the corner. This is the window where a rushed overhead quietly costs matches. The players who spend August turning their weakest overhead into a reliable one walk into the fall season with a shot their opponents will avoid testing. That is the whole point of training a skill under live conditions — it shows up when it counts.
If you want to see how the overhead fits into the rest of our development approach, take a look at our coaching philosophy — the same Six Pillars run through every stroke we teach, not just the flashy ones.
The overhead does not have to be the shot your junior dreads. Train it where it lives — inside real rallies, under real pressure, counted honestly — and it becomes the shot they want to hit.
See you on the court.
— Coach Michael Boothman SRQ Tennis, Sarasota FL