Watch a group of ten-year-olds on a Sarasota court for a few minutes and you will notice something the drill sheet never mentions. The kid waiting in line is not standing still. She is shadowing the swing of the player who is hitting. Nobody told her to. Her body is copying a shape it finds interesting, and that copying is doing real work.
I am Michael Boothman, and after thirty years of coaching juniors here in Sarasota, I have stopped treating that as goofing off and started treating it as part of the lesson. There is a large body of motor-learning research behind it, usually filed under observational learning or modeling, and it explains why some of the fastest technical changes I see happen when a player is not even holding a ball.
The brain rehearses what the eyes watch
When a young player watches someone hit a clean forehand, parts of the brain that plan and execute that same movement light up as if she were doing it herself. Researchers call the underlying system the mirror-neuron network, and the practical upshot is simple: careful watching is a mild form of practice. The nervous system builds a rough template of the movement before the racquet ever enters the picture.
That template matters because of how I think about technique. One of the Six Pillars I coach by is Technique Is Geometry — center contact and a square face, the two laws of ball-striking. I am not trying to install a twelve-part checklist of elbow angles and hip turns. I am trying to get a player to feel the shape of a good contact. And a shape is exactly the kind of thing the eyes learn well and words learn badly. You can talk to a nine-year-old about racquet-face angle for ten minutes, or you can let her watch three good contacts in a row and then try it. The second one usually wins.
Why watching beats another long explanation
Here is the trap I fell into for years, and that I see plenty of well-meaning coaches and parents fall into: when a junior struggles, we explain more. More cues, more corrections, more words. But a flood of verbal instruction can actually crowd out the movement the player is trying to build. The research on this is consistent — learners often pick up a skill more cleanly from a good model plus a little guided attention than from a stack of detailed verbal instructions.
That fits another Pillar, Confidence Is Built, Not Given. Confidence comes from evidence — from a player watching a shot she can actually reproduce, trying it, and landing it. When the model is right in front of her and the target is clear, she gets that evidence fast. When she is buried under corrections, she gets slower and more tentative. Same kid, very different afternoon.
How I use it in a Sarasota group
The small-group format we run — capped at six players — is not just about crowd control. It is what makes observational learning usable. In a group of six, every player watches five others hit before her next turn. That is dozens of live models an hour, most of them close to her own level, which research suggests is actually more useful than only watching a flawless adult. A model who is a half-step ahead of you is easier to copy than a professional whose timing is out of reach.
A few things I do on purpose:
I point the watching. Idle watching helps a little. Directed watching helps a lot. Before a rep I will tell the waiting players exactly one thing to look for — “watch where his strings meet the ball,” not “watch his whole swing.” One clear focus turns passive spectating into targeted rehearsal.
I let good models emerge from the group. When a player hits three clean ones in a row, I will quietly have the others watch that player rather than me. Peers pay closer attention to a peer, and the hitter gets a shot of earned confidence.
I mix watching with immediate doing. The template from watching fades if it is not used. So we watch, then hit, within a few seconds — never watch for ten minutes and then try to remember it later.
What this means if you are a tennis parent
You do not need to run drills to use any of this. If your child plays here in Sarasota — Potter Park, Pineview, wherever your courts are — the most useful thing you can do is put good tennis in front of her eyes and then get out of the way. Watch a college match at a local tournament. Pull up a point or two of clean baseline rallying, not a highlight reel of winners. Let her watch a slightly older kid at the courts who moves well.
Then resist the urge to narrate. You are not the coach in that moment, and a running commentary of “see how she bends her knees” turns a rich visual model into another word problem. Let her eyes do the work. If you want a way to think about the balance between showing and telling, I wrote more about that in our coaching approach, and the USTA’s player development resources at usta.com are a solid, non-hype place for parents to start.
The quiet part of getting better
Most of what makes a junior improve is loud and obvious — reps, sweat, the Sarasota summer heat, the score at the end of a challenge game. But a real slice of it is quiet. It is a kid on the sideline, shadowing a swing she liked, building a movement her body will try next. Thirty years in, I have learned not to interrupt that. The best thing I can do is make sure the tennis she is watching is worth copying, point her eyes at the right inch of contact, and then hand her a ball while the picture is still fresh.
That is the whole trick. Show something worth imitating. Say less than you want to. Let them watch, then let them hit.
— Michael Boothman is a USPTA Elite Professional and the founder of SRQ Tennis in Sarasota, Florida. Reach him at 941-239-4703 or michael@srq.tennis.