Ask most junior players in Sarasota which side they’d rather hit under pressure, and the honest ones say the forehand. The backhand is where rallies get short, where the ball floats, where a player starts running around the shot instead of trusting it. That’s not a talent problem. It’s usually a practice problem — the backhand gets fewer reps, and the reps it does get come off a slow, friendly feed that looks nothing like a real point.
I’m Michael Boothman, a USPTA Elite Professional and the founder of SRQ Tennis here in Sarasota. Over thirty-plus years of coaching I’ve watched hundreds of juniors “fix” their backhand on a ball machine and then lose it the moment a match started. The drill below is how we build a backhand that actually holds up, and it leans on one of our Six Pillars in particular: Live Ball Is the Method.
Why the backhand breaks down
A two-handed backhand isn’t complicated to describe. The trouble is that most kids only ever groove it in conditions that don’t repeat in a match. They stand still, the ball arrives at the same height and speed every time, and they take a big, clean swing. It looks great. Then they play a set and the backhand shows up late, cramped, and off-balance — because now the ball is deep, or short, or dipping, and their feet never had to solve those problems in practice.
Live Ball Is the Method means exactly what it sounds like: the majority of court time should be spent hitting balls that come off a racquet, in a rally, not off a basket or a machine. A fed ball teaches a swing. A live ball teaches a swing plus timing, spacing, reading the incoming shot, and recovering for the next one. Those last four are the whole game. When a backhand falls apart in a match, it’s almost never the swing that failed — it’s the timing and spacing around it.
The Two-Line Backhand Drill
Here’s the drill we run at Potter Park and Pineview. It needs two players (or a player and a coach) and about ten minutes.
Setup. Both players start at the baseline, cross-court on the backhand diagonal (ad-court to ad-court for two righties). One target: a cone or a towel placed a step inside the sideline, about a step and a half in front of the baseline. That’s the target zone for every ball.
The rule. Every ball is a backhand, hit cross-court, aimed at the target zone. No forehands, no down-the-line escapes. If the ball comes to your forehand side, you move your feet to take it as a backhand anyway. This is the part that makes it work — the player can’t run around the shot, so their feet have to solve the spacing problem instead.
The count. Players rally and count how many backhands in a row land in the target zone. Not just in the court — in the zone. We’re chasing a live-ball accuracy number, which ties into another pillar, Accuracy Inside Representative Conditions: eight out of ten to a target, but under match-like conditions, not off a feed. A backhand that lands anywhere in the court during a lazy warm-up doesn’t count. A backhand that lands in a one-yard target box during a live rally does.
Progression. Start with a cooperative rally — both players trying to keep it going and hit the zone. Once a pair can string together ten in a row, add mild pressure: the rally becomes a point that only starts on the fourth ball, so the first three have to be controlled backhands before anyone can go for a winner. That small constraint keeps the backhand honest under a little bit of stress, which is where it usually cracks.
What the coach is actually watching
Not the swing. I know that sounds strange coming from a coach, but the swing is rarely the thing worth fixing in the moment. What I’m watching is contact — where the ball meets the strings, and whether the racquet face is square when it does. That’s our third pillar, Technique Is Geometry: a centered contact point and a square face at the moment of impact do more for accuracy than any amount of grip talk or elbow instruction. If the backhand is spraying, nine times out of ten it’s a late contact point, and the fix is footwork, not a lecture about the swing.
So the cues stay short. “Meet it out front.” “Turn early, get there early.” “Same target every time.” A player hears a target and a spacing cue; they don’t hear a mechanical checklist mid-rally. Motor-learning research is pretty consistent on this — an external focus of attention, on the ball and the target rather than on the body, tends to produce better and more transferable skill than an internal, body-part focus. Organizations like the USTA build their coaching guidance around the same evidence-based principles.
Why the number matters
At the end of the drill, the players have a number: their best streak of target-zone backhands in a live rally. Next week we run it again and compare. That’s our fourth pillar in action — Confidence Is Built, Not Given. A kid who tells me “my backhand is better” doesn’t move me much. A kid who shows me that last week’s best streak was six and this week’s was eleven has actual evidence, and evidence is what confidence is made of. Empty praise wears off by the next changeover. A number the player earned holds up.
Taking it home
You don’t need a coach or a court reservation to make progress on this. Two juniors on any public court in Sarasota can run the Two-Line Backhand Drill with one cone and a phone to write down the streak. Cooperative rally, backhand only, cross-court, count the zone. Ten minutes, twice a week, and by fall the backhand stops being the shot they hide.
If you want to see how the rest of our training is built the same way — live ball, real numbers, small groups — take a look at how we coach at SRQ Tennis. And if you’ve got a junior in Sarasota whose backhand goes missing in matches, that’s usually the most fixable problem on the court. It just takes the right kind of reps.
See you on the court.
— Coach Michael