Most juniors miss the same first volley for the same reason: they practice it standing still. They stand at the service line, a coach feeds a slow ball, and they punch it back into an open court with all the time in the world. It looks clean. Then they play a real point, come forward off a short ball, and the volley sails long or dumps into the net. The stroke was never the problem. The situation was.
I’m Michael Boothman, a USPTA Elite Professional and the founder of SRQ Tennis here in Sarasota, and after thirty-plus years on the court I’ve stopped teaching the first volley as a technique. I teach it as a moment inside a rally — because that’s the only place it ever actually happens. This is one of my favorite drills for that, and it takes five minutes to set up on any public court in town.
Why the fed-ball volley lies to you
The reason a static volley feed doesn’t transfer to a match is one of the clearest ideas in how we train: Live Ball Is the Method. It’s the second of the Six Pillars, and it’s not a slogan — it’s a statement about how skill is built. A skill practiced in conditions that don’t match the game tends to stay in those conditions. The player who looks smooth punching fed volleys has learned to punch fed volleys. That’s a different task from reading a real ball off an opponent’s racquet, moving forward through it, and adjusting the racquet face in the last split second.
The volley in a match is never delivered on a platter. It arrives at a slightly wrong height, a little too fast or too slow, sometimes with spin, and always while the player is still moving forward. If you want a junior to volley well in a match, the practice has to contain those same problems. Otherwise you’re rehearsing a skill they’ll never get to use.
The drill: approach, close, first volley
Here’s how it runs. You need two players (or a coach and a player) and, ideally, a couple of target cones.
The feeder stands on the baseline. The working player starts on the baseline too, on the ad or deuce side. The feeder puts a short ball into play — not a soft lob, a real ball that lands around the service line and pulls the player forward. The player has to read it, move through it with a controlled approach shot, and keep coming. The feeder then hits one live reply — a genuine passing-shot attempt or a dipping ball at the feet — and the working player has to produce a first volley that lands past the service line and inside the singles court.
That’s the whole point. The player never gets to set up. They’re moving, the ball is live, and they have one job: land a controlled volley deep enough to stay on offense. We play it as a mini-point from there if we want, but the rep we’re scoring is that first volley.
A few things I insist on:
- The approach and the volley are one sequence, not two drills. The player who stops after the approach to admire it never learns to close. The forward momentum is part of the shot.
- The feeder actually tries. A cooperative feeder who taps it back to the middle defeats the purpose. The passing attempt has to be real enough that the volley is a genuine reaction.
- We coach the contact, not the choreography. Center of the strings, square face, out in front. That’s the third pillar — Technique Is Geometry — and for a volley it’s almost the entire technique. No backswing to fuss over. Just get the racquet in front and let the ball meet a stable, square face.
Put a number on it
This is where the drill stops being busywork and starts building something. I don’t tell a player “get better at volleys.” I give them a target and a count. The standard I use is the 85/100 Rule inside representative conditions — build accuracy in live, game-like reps, not off a basket. On this drill, that looks like: out of ten sequences, how many first volleys land past the service line and inside the singles sideline? A younger player might start at 3 out of 10 the first day. That’s fine. That’s the number we’re going to move.
That count matters more than it looks, because it’s honest. It’s measured under the same movement and the same live ball the player will face in a match, so it means something. When a junior goes from 4 out of 10 to 7 out of 10 over a few weeks, that’s not a feeling — it’s the fourth pillar in action: Confidence Is Built, Not Given. The player believes in the volley because they watched the number climb. I didn’t tell them they were good at it. The scoreboard did.
Scaling it for the player in front of you
For a 10-and-under player, I widen the target zone and slow the feeder’s passing attempt down a notch — the ball still has to be live, but a nine-year-old and a fourteen-year-old don’t need the same pace to be challenged. For an older, sharper junior, I shrink the target, ask the feeder to hit harder, and sometimes add a second ball so the player has to volley, recover, and volley again. Same drill, same pillar, different difficulty. The goal is that every player is missing enough to be learning and making enough to stay confident — challenged, not buried.
If you want the deeper logic behind why we train almost everything this way, I’ve written about our full approach on the coaching page. And if you want an outside reference on why net play and the transition game are worth the practice time for developing juniors, the USTA’s player development resources are a solid place to start.
The takeaway for parents
If you’re watching your child practice and every volley they hit is a slow fed ball, ask about it. Not because the coach is wrong to warm up that way, but because the warm-up shouldn’t be the whole session. A junior who can only volley when the ball is handed to them hasn’t learned to volley yet — they’ve learned to warm up. The real skill is built in the mess of a live ball, on the move, with a number on the wall.
If you’ve got a junior in Sarasota who freezes at the net or bails on the approach, this is a five-minute fix you can start on any court. Come find us — we run it every week.
See you on the court, Coach Michael Boothman