Most of the juniors I work with can rally all day from the baseline, then freeze the second they get pulled to the net. The feet get heavy, the racquet gets loud, and a shot that should be a two-foot tap turns into a wild swing that sails long. I’m Michael Boothman, and after thirty-plus years coaching in Sarasota, I’ve watched this same pattern show up in players of every level. The good news: the fix isn’t complicated, and it doesn’t require a ball machine or an hour of fed balls. It requires the two of you standing close together and hitting.
This is the volley-to-volley drill. It’s one of the simplest things I run at Potter Park and Pineview, and it’s also one of the most honest. There’s nowhere to hide up close. Either you make clean contact or the ball tells on you right away.
Why the net is where technique gets exposed
When you’re twelve feet from your partner, you get almost no time. There’s no big backswing to hide behind, no loop to disguise a late racquet. Everything happens in front of you or it doesn’t happen at all. That’s exactly why the volley is such a good teacher.
It lines up with the pillar I lean on hardest here: Technique Is Geometry. The idea is that a good shot comes down to two things — center contact and a square racquet face — not a memorized set of body positions. I call these the Two Laws of Ball-Striking. On a groundstroke you can get away with breaking one of them and still muscle the ball back. On a volley you can’t. Miss the center of the strings by an inch up close and the ball squirts off sideways. Open the face a few degrees and it floats. The net punishes bad geometry immediately, which makes it the perfect place to build good geometry.
So instead of treating volleys as an advanced skill for later, I use them early, precisely because the feedback is so fast and so clear.
Setting up the drill
You need one partner and one ball. That’s it. Here’s how it runs:
Start close. Both players stand inside the service boxes, roughly ten to twelve feet apart, facing each other across the net. Yes, that’s closer than feels natural. Close is the point.
Rally with control, not pace. The goal is to keep a volley-to-volley rally going — no bounce, no groundstrokes, just soft controlled volleys back and forth. You’re not trying to win the point. You’re trying to keep the ball alive with clean contact.
Count out loud. Every clean volley is one. See how high the two of you can get. First target is ten in a row. When ten becomes easy, push for twenty.
Keep the racquet in front. The single most common mistake is letting the hands drift back beside the body. Cue it simply: catch the ball out in front, like you’re shaking hands with it. Short punch, no swing.
The whole thing should look calm. If it looks busy and frantic, you’re too far apart or swinging too big. Move a step closer and quiet the hands down.
Progressions once the rally holds
Once a pair can hold a rally of ten or more without a miss, I add layers. Each one keeps the live-ball, back-and-forth format — I’m not switching to fed balls, because the whole value here is that a real ball is coming back at you and you have to adjust.
Step back one line. Move from the service line toward the middle of the box, then eventually toward the baseline side of the service box. More distance means more time, but also more chance to over-swing. The job is to keep the same quiet contact from farther away.
Target the strings, not the count. Now we care about where on the racquet the ball lands. I’ll ask a player to tell me after each miss whether they caught it center, toward the tip, or near the throat. Naming it builds awareness of contact — the first of the Two Laws — far faster than me shouting “watch the ball.”
Add a low ball. One player intentionally sends a couple below net height. The other has to bend the knees and keep the face square through the dig instead of scooping with the wrist. This is where you find out who’s using their legs and who’s using their arm.
Move to one-up, one-back. Finally, one player steps to the baseline and feeds groundstrokes while the net player volleys them back into a controlled target zone. Now the net player is reacting to real pace off the ground, which is what actually happens in a point.
The number that matters
I don’t let players guess whether they’re improving. We track it. A pair that started at three or four volleys in a row before a miss should be holding fifteen to twenty within a couple of weeks of doing this two or three times a session. When a kid can look at that jump — from four to eighteen — the confidence is real, because it’s built on evidence they created themselves, not on me telling them “nice hands.” That’s the whole point of tracking: the scoreboard does the convincing.
If you want to see how this connects to the rest of how I train players, the coaching page walks through the full approach. The volley-to-volley drill is a small piece, but it’s a piece that shows up in almost every practice because it’s so efficient — two players, one ball, immediate feedback.
A note for parents watching from the fence
If you’re watching your child do this at a Sarasota park and it looks almost too easy — two kids standing close, gently tapping a ball back and forth — trust that the simplicity is deliberate. The USTA’s own player development materials emphasize that clean contact and control at the net are foundational skills built through repetition under control, not through flashy put-away practice (USTA Player Development). The soft, boring-looking rally is where the reliable volley actually gets built. The highlight-reel put-away comes later, and it comes easily once the hands are quiet and the contact is clean.
Give it a try this week. Ten in a row, then twenty. Count out loud, keep the racquet in front, and let the net do the teaching.
See you on the court!
Coach Michael