If you play tennis in Sarasota in August, you already know the pattern. The morning is bright and calm, the courts dry out by nine, and then sometime after two the sky over the Gulf turns the color of a bruise and the afternoon washes out. It happens most days this time of year, and it wrecks more junior practice sessions than any other single thing.
I’m Michael Boothman, and after 30-plus years of coaching in this area I’ve learned to stop fighting the weather and start planning around it. The storms are not a problem to solve. They’re a schedule to read. Here’s how I think about training through Sarasota’s wettest stretch, and how families can keep their players moving forward instead of losing six weeks to the radar.
Why August is different here
Sarasota sits on the Gulf Coast in the heart of Florida’s summer convection season. Warm, wet air builds through the morning, and by early afternoon it stacks up into thunderstorms that arrive fast, drop a lot of water, and often clear within an hour. The National Weather Service tracks this as part of the region’s normal summer climate — you can look at the regional forecast and radar for west-central Florida and see how reliably the rain shows up in the afternoon window.
For tennis, that reliability is actually good news. Unpredictable rain is hard to plan around. Predictable afternoon rain is not. Once you accept that the useful, dry court time in August is mostly before noon, the whole week gets easier to organize.
Own the morning window
The single biggest adjustment I ask families to make in July and August is to move court time earlier. A 9:00 a.m. session on a public court at Payne Park or Arlington Park is almost always playable. A 4:30 p.m. session is a coin flip, and the coin is weighted toward rain.
Morning play has a second benefit that has nothing to do with dry courts: it’s cooler and safer. Heat index in the afternoon can push past levels where hard training stops being productive and starts being a health risk. The USTA has published clear guidance on playing tennis safely in the heat that’s worth reading with your player before the season, especially for kids who don’t yet notice when they’re overheating.
If you can only get one solid session in on a given day, make it the morning one. Build the week around that instead of hoping the afternoon holds.
Read the radar like a coach, not a gambler
Every parent I work with has a weather app. Very few use it well. The forecast percentage — “60% chance of rain” — tells you almost nothing about whether your 10:00 court time is safe. What you actually want is the radar loop and the direction the cells are moving.
Here’s the simple version I teach: pull up the animated radar an hour before you leave. If the cells are still out over the Gulf and moving inland slowly, you probably have a clean window. If there’s already green and yellow stacking up over Bradenton or Lakewood Ranch and drifting your way, you’re on the clock. Learning to read that loop turns a wasted trip into a good decision. It’s a small skill that saves a whole summer of frustration.
Make rain days count instead of writing them off
Here’s where I’ll push back on the instinct to treat a rained-out afternoon as a lost day. It isn’t, if you use it right.
One of the six pillars I coach by is Confidence Is Built, Not Given — the idea that real belief comes from evidence and tracked progress, not from a pep talk. A rain day is a perfect time to look at that evidence. Sit down with your player and review the numbers from the week: how many first serves landed in the target box, how many forehands found the deep cross-court zone in the last live-ball drill, what the between-point routine looked like when a game got tight. Players almost never see their own progress in the moment. A quiet indoor half hour looking at the last two weeks of numbers does more for confidence than another bucket of balls.
Rain days are also good for the parts of development that don’t need a court at all. Shadow swings in the garage to groove a contact point. Footwork ladder work on the patio under cover. Watching 20 minutes of a pro match with a specific job — “count how many times she resets a hard ball back to the middle” — which trains the eyes to read tennis the way good footwork work trains the feet. None of that requires a dry court, and all of it compounds.
What I don’t recommend
I’ll be honest about the thing families ask about most: moving everything indoors or onto a ball machine to beat the weather. I understand the appeal, and there’s a place for both. But most of the meaningful development in tennis happens in live, unpredictable rallies against another human being — that’s why Live Ball Is the Method is one of the pillars, not a footnote. A week of nothing but machine feeds is a week of practicing a skill that doesn’t fully transfer to a match, where the ball never arrives the same way twice. Use the machine to warm up a stroke or drill a specific pattern. Don’t let a rainy stretch quietly turn it into the whole diet.
Better to protect two or three real live-ball sessions a week in the morning window than to chase five artificial ones indoors.
Putting it together
A realistic August week for a developing Sarasota junior looks like this: two or three morning court sessions before the heat and the storms, planned around the radar rather than the calendar. One or two rain-flexible slots that convert to review, shadow work, or match-watching if the sky opens up. And a genuine day or two off, because summer is long and August is hot, and rest is part of the plan, not a failure of it.
The families who get through this stretch well aren’t the ones who out-stubborn the weather. They’re the ones who read it, plan around it, and keep the momentum going in whatever form the day allows. If you want to see how we structure that kind of development across a full season, take a look at how I approach coaching — the weather changes, but the priorities don’t.
The storms will keep coming until September. Plan for them, and your player won’t lose a step.
Michael Boothman is a USPTA Elite Professional and the founder of SRQ Tennis in Sarasota, Florida. Questions about summer training? Reach him at 941-239-4703 or michael@srq.tennis.