Most junior players can hit a nice inside-out forehand when a coach feeds it to them from a basket. The ball lands in the same spot every time, they step around it, and they crush it crosscourt. It looks great. Then a match starts, the ball comes back at a different height and angle, and the whole pattern falls apart.
I’m Michael Boothman, a USPTA Elite Professional and the founder of SRQ Tennis here in Sarasota. I’ve spent more than thirty years watching that exact gap between the practice court and the match court. The inside-out forehand is one of the most useful weapons a developing player can own, but only if it’s built the way it actually shows up in points. That’s what this drill is about.
Why the inside-out forehand matters
The inside-out forehand is when a right-handed player runs around their backhand in the middle or backhand corner and hits a forehand diagonally to the opponent’s backhand side. For a lefty, it’s the mirror image. It lets a player use their stronger wing more often, and it pushes the ball into the corner most opponents defend worst.
The trouble is that it’s a movement pattern first and a stroke second. You have to read the ball early, get around it, set your feet, and still keep the contact clean. If any one of those pieces is missing, you either shank it or you leave the whole open court exposed. So we don’t teach it by feeding forehands to a spot. We build it inside a live rally, where the read and the movement are part of the rep.
The drill: middle-ball recognition into inside-out
This runs off Pillar 2 of our coaching philosophy, Live Ball Is the Method. Real rallies, not fed balls or a machine. The player only learns to recognize the right ball to attack if the ball is actually behaving like it does in a point.
Here’s the setup. Coach and player rally crosscourt, backhand to backhand, at a steady, cooperative pace. Nothing fancy yet. Then, on the coach’s choice, one ball lands short and toward the middle of the court, floating a little. That’s the trigger ball. The player’s job is to recognize it, step around the backhand, and hit an inside-out forehand into a target zone in the deep backhand corner.
If the ball is deep or wide, the player keeps rallying with the backhand. Only the short middle ball gets attacked. That decision, hit or don’t hit, is the whole point. In a match, choosing the wrong ball to run around is what gets juniors burned. The drill trains the eyes and the feet together, not just the swing.
Scoring it so it means something
Feelings lie. Numbers don’t. Pillar 4 is Confidence Is Built, Not Given, which means we track this with real evidence instead of telling a kid “nice one” and moving on.
Put a target zone in the deep backhand corner, roughly the back third of the court, a racquet-length or two inside both lines. Run ten trigger balls. Count how many inside-out forehands land in the zone. We’re looking for the same standard we use across our program: eight out of ten to the target under live conditions. Not off a basket feed, where anyone can look good, but inside the rally, where the ball is unpredictable and the player had to move to it first.
If a player is landing four of ten, the answer is almost never “swing harder.” It’s usually that they attacked the wrong ball, or they didn’t get far enough around it and had to reach. Track the misses honestly and you’ll see the pattern in a couple of sessions.
The one cue that fixes most of it
When juniors miss the inside-out forehand, coaches love to pile on instructions: rotate your hips, use your legs, brush up the back of the ball, follow through over your shoulder. That’s too much to hold in your head while a ball is coming at you.
We coach the contact, not the choreography. That’s Pillar 3, Technique Is Geometry: a centered contact point with a square racquet face sends the ball where you aim. So the single cue for this drill is spacing. Get your feet set so the ball arrives out in front and off to your side, not jammed into your body. When a player gives themselves room, the clean contact and the crosscourt angle mostly take care of themselves. Fix the spacing and you fix the shot.
If you want a deeper look at why we keep our coaching cues this simple, I wrote about our full approach on the coaching page.
Progressions once the pattern holds
When a player is consistently reading the trigger ball and hitting eight of ten, add layers that make it more match-like:
The coach starts mixing in a few deep balls that look short at first, so the player has to hold their read a beat longer before committing. Then the coach adds a recovery step, hitting the next ball back to the open forehand corner so the player has to hit the inside-out and then move to cover the court, the way a real point would punish a lazy recovery. Finally, play it out as a live point. The trigger ball starts the attack, and then it’s just tennis from there.
Each layer adds a little chaos, which is the point. Skills that only work in calm, predictable conditions don’t survive a match. There’s solid motor-learning research behind this, that practice which varies the conditions transfers better to competition than repetitive blocked practice. The USTA’s player development resources are a good starting point for parents and coaches who want to read more on how skills actually transfer.
For parents watching from the fence
If your junior is doing a version of this drill and getting frustrated, that frustration is usually a good sign. It means they’re being asked to make a decision under a little pressure, which is exactly what a match demands. The fix is rarely more effort. It’s better ball recognition and better footwork, and those come from reps inside live rallies, not from a basket.
A player who can pick the right ball, get around it, and land eight of ten in the corner has a genuine weapon, one that holds up when the score matters. That’s the difference between a shot that looks good in warmups and a shot that wins points on a Saturday morning in Sarasota.
If you’ve got a junior in the Sarasota area working on their game and you want to talk through how we build these patterns, you can reach me, Michael Boothman, at michael@srq.tennis or 941-239-4703. Come out to a public court and I’ll show you what a live rep really looks like.
See you on the court.