Ask most people what makes a young tennis player pull away from the pack, and they’ll point to something flashy — a big serve, quick feet, a wicked forehand. After thirty-plus years on public courts around Sarasota, I’ve watched a quieter habit do more work than any single stroke. I’m Michael Boothman, founder of SRQ Tennis, and the players who get better fastest aren’t usually the most talented ones in the group. They’re the ones who know their own numbers.
Not “I think my forehand is getting better.” Actual numbers. How many balls out of ten they can land in a target zone under pressure. How many first serves they made in their last practice set. How many times they reset a rally instead of going for a low-percentage winner. The great ones can tell you. The average ones shrug.
Why numbers beat feelings
This connects directly to one of the Six Pillars I coach by: Confidence Is Built, Not Given. You can’t hand a kid confidence with a pep talk. Telling an eleven-year-old “you’ve got a great forehand” right after they’ve dumped six in a row into the net doesn’t land — they know it isn’t true, and now they trust you a little less. Confidence that holds up in a match is built from evidence the player collected themselves.
Here’s what that looks like on the court. Instead of feeding a player fifty forehands and saying “nice, looking good,” we set a target and count. Eight out of ten crosscourt into a zone the size of a beach towel, hit inside a live rally, not off a soft feed. When a player hits that number, they don’t need me to tell them they’re improving. They watched it happen. The scoreboard is real, and it’s theirs.
The research backs this up. Self-monitoring — having athletes track and record their own performance — is one of the more reliable ways to accelerate skill learning, because it forces attention onto the specific thing that needs to change and gives honest feedback in real time. The USTA’s coaching resources lean the same direction: measurable, player-owned progress over vague encouragement. When a kid owns the measurement, they own the improvement.
The good-to-great gap is mostly attention
I’ve had two players of nearly identical ability sit five feet apart on the same bench. One of them, after a practice set, could tell me exactly where the match got away — “I lost four points in a row trying to hit winners off short balls.” The other just said it “felt off.” Same age, same strokes, same amount of court time. Six months later they weren’t close anymore, and it wasn’t because one had more talent. One was paying attention to the right things and the other was paying attention to the scoreboard on the wall.
Great players narrow their focus to what they can control and measure: contact quality, first-serve percentage, how many rallies they let get to four shots before trying to end them. Good players stay stuck on outcomes they can’t directly control — winning, losing, whether they looked good doing it. The gap between those two mindsets widens every single week.
That’s why I resist the urge to over-coach. If I’m talking the whole lesson, the player isn’t building their own read on what’s working. My job is to set the target, count honestly, and then get out of the way enough that the player starts counting for themselves. The habit has to transfer to the days I’m not standing there.
How to build the habit at home
Parents ask me all the time how to help without turning every session into a lecture. The answer is almost always the same: help your kid measure one thing, and keep it small.
Pick a single number that matters this month — say, first serves in. After a practice or a match, ask one question: “How many first serves did you make out of your last ten?” Not “did you win,” not “how’d it go.” Just the number. If they don’t know, that’s useful information too; next time they’ll start counting because they know you’ll ask. You’re not adding pressure. You’re teaching them where to point their attention.
Keep the number honest and keep it theirs. The moment it becomes a thing you’re grading them on, it stops working — it turns into another source of anxiety instead of a tool the player controls. The goal is a kid who, walking off the court, already knows what got better and what didn’t, without waiting for anyone to tell them.
The long game
Thirty years in, the players I’ve watched go the furthest weren’t the ones with the prettiest strokes at age ten. They were the ones who learned early to look at their own game clearly — to gather evidence, sit with what it said, and adjust. That’s a skill that outlasts tennis. It shows up in how they study, how they handle a bad grade, how they run toward a hard thing instead of away from it.
Small-group tennis on a public court in Sarasota isn’t a bad place to learn it. Six kids, real rallies, a target on the court, and a coach who counts out loud until the players start counting for themselves. No hype required. Just a habit, built one honest number at a time.
If you want to know more about how I coach and why I run programs the way I do, you can read more on my about page. And if you’ve got a young player who’s ready to start measuring their own game, the courts are right here in the neighborhood.
— Michael Boothman Founder, SRQ Tennis · Sarasota, FL michael@srq.tennis · 941-239-4703