Every coach has seen it. A junior who rallies beautifully in practice steps onto the court for a real match, and the forehand that flowed all week suddenly looks like it belongs to someone else. Short backswing. Late contact. A ball that sails long by three feet. The parents look at me like the kid forgot how to play tennis overnight.
They didn’t forget anything. My name is Michael Boothman, and after 30-plus years coaching juniors here in Sarasota, I can tell you what usually happened: under pressure, the player started thinking about the stroke. And thinking about a stroke you already own is one of the fastest ways to break it.
The science has a name for it
Researchers call this reinvestment, or the conscious processing hypothesis. The short version: when the pressure goes up, we start consciously monitoring and controlling movements that used to run on autopilot. We “reinvest” explicit, step-by-step knowledge — take the racquet back, turn the shoulders, brush up the back of the ball — into a skill that had already become automatic. And that conscious control gums up the works.
A peer-reviewed study on reinvestment and choking under pressure lays it out plainly: performers who score high on the tendency to consciously monitor their movements tend to choke more when the stakes rise. The skill is still in there. The problem is the mind reaching in mid-swing to steer it.
Here is the part that matters most for how we coach juniors. The research also shows that players who learned a skill through a pile of explicit verbal instructions are more likely to reinvest under pressure — because they have all that rule-based knowledge sitting there, ready to be pulled up at exactly the wrong moment. If a kid learned their forehand as a checklist of eight cues, guess what shows up in the third set of a tight match? The checklist.
Why over-coaching creates the problem
This is why I am careful about how much I talk during a lesson, and it is one of the reasons the third of our Six Pillars is Technique Is Geometry. The pillar is simple: what actually decides where the ball goes is center contact on a square racquet face. That’s it — the geometry of the strike. So I coach the contact, not the choreography.
When I say “coach the contact, not the choreography,” I mean I would rather a player feel a clean center hit and see the ball go where they aimed than memorize a nine-step sequence for how the arm is supposed to move. The stroke that shows up under pressure should be a feel, not a recital. A feel doesn’t have eight parts to forget. Contact does not get stage fright.
Over-coaching — the constant stream of “bend your knees, follow through higher, get your racquet back earlier” — feels productive. Parents love hearing it. But every extra rule I hand a player is another thing their working memory can grab and misuse when their heart rate is at 160. The more explicit instructions I load in, the more ammunition I’ve given the choke.
What I train instead
If conscious control is the leak, the fix is to give the mind something useful to do that isn’t steering the swing. Three things I lean on, all built on our approach here in Sarasota:
Build the skill inside live conditions, not off a basket. Our first pillar is Accuracy Inside Representative Conditions. When a player earns their accuracy in live rallies — real incoming balls, real decisions — the skill gets wired to the game itself, not to a set of words. That’s a big reason we keep the majority of court time in live ball. A stroke grooved in a rally is far less dependent on verbal cues than one grooved feeding balls to yourself, so there’s less to reinvest when it counts.
Give attention an external target. Instead of “brush up the back of the ball” (internal, about the body), I’ll say “land it on the deuce sideline, three feet inside the baseline.” An external target — where the ball is going — keeps the mind out of the mechanics. This lines up neatly with the reinvestment research: you can’t consciously control the swing if you’re busy tracking a target outside your body.
Give the between-point mind a routine. Our sixth pillar, Channel the Fire, includes the Between-Point Routine — breathe, cue, target, visualize, go. Notice the cue is one word, not a checklist, and the last two steps point outward at the target and the shot, not inward at the arm. The routine isn’t just about calming nerves. It’s about occupying attention with the right things so it can’t wander into the swing.
What this looks like for a Sarasota parent
If your junior plays great in practice and shrinks in matches, the instinct is to add coaching — more tips, more corrections, more “remember to.” The research, and 30 years on public courts here, both point the other direction. The match-day fix is usually less thinking about technique, not more.
So on the ride to a tournament, please resist the urge to review the mechanics. Don’t run the checklist. If you want to say something useful, keep it external and simple: “Pick your target and commit to it.” That one sentence does more good than a full stroke lecture, because it points the mind where it belongs.
And in practice, look for a coach who isn’t drowning your kid in cues. Watching a good junior lesson, you should hear a lot of ball-striking and not a constant voice-over. If you want to see how we structure that — live ball, targets, and the Six Pillars — take a look at how I coach. The goal isn’t a player who can recite the perfect forehand. It’s a player whose forehand shows up on its own when the match is on the line.
The stroke is already in there. Our job is to build it so well, and clutter it so little, that the pressure can’t talk the player out of it.
— Michael Boothman is a USPTA Elite Professional and the founder of SRQ Tennis in Sarasota, FL. Questions about junior development? Reach him at michael@srq.tennis or 941-239-4703.