Ask most junior players where matches get away from them, and after a while the honest answer surfaces: the second serve. The first serve feels free. The second one carries the fear of a double fault, and fear tightens the arm at the exact moment it needs to stay loose. In thirty-plus years of coaching in Sarasota, I have watched more close matches turn on second serves than on any flashy winner. So this is the drill I keep coming back to. I am Michael Boothman, founder of SRQ Tennis, and this one lives at the center of how we build serves that hold up when the score matters.
The mistake I see everywhere is players “practicing” the second serve alone, on an empty court, feeding themselves ball after ball into an open box. It looks like work. It rarely transfers. The reason ties directly to the first of our Six Pillars: Accuracy Inside Representative Conditions. Placement has to be built inside live, game-like conditions, not off a quiet feed. A serve you can land 9 out of 10 times with nobody watching and nothing on the line is a different skill from a serve you can land at 4-5, deuce, second ball. The nervous system treats those as two separate tasks. If you only ever train the calm version, the pressure version never shows up on match day.
Why the calm rep lies to you
There is a good reason for this, and it is not about toughness. Under pressure your body changes. Heart rate climbs, attention narrows, the small stabilizing muscles in the shoulder and wrist fire a little differently. A motor pattern grooved in a calm state does not automatically survive that shift. The research on this is consistent — skill learned in one context does not fully carry to a different context unless you train close to the conditions you will compete in. That is why the empty-court second serve feels so good and helps so little.
So instead of asking “can you hit a good second serve,” the Second-Serve Game asks a harder and more honest question: can you hit a good second serve when a double fault costs you something? That small stake changes everything.
The drill
Here is how we run it. It works for one player against a coach or a partner, and it scales up to a small group easily.
Setup. The server gets first serves out of the way — one first serve is allowed, but the point of this drill is the ball that follows. On any first serve that misses, the server must play a second serve, and the point is live from there. The returner plays it out. Normal scoring.
The stake. A double fault is not just a lost point. It is minus two. Land the second serve and play the point out normally, win or lose one. That scoring quirk makes the double fault sting the way it stings in a real match, which is the whole idea. You are training the decision under a consequence, not in a vacuum.
The target. We do not just say “get it in.” Each server picks a target — usually the backhand side, a strip about the width of two racquets deep in the box. The standard we hold is 8 out of 10 second serves landing in that live game before we call the serve match-ready. That is the 85/100 Rule in practice: a real, countable number under real conditions, not a vibe.
The progression. Once a player clears 8 out of 10 in the game, we raise the pressure, not the difficulty of the target. Play a tiebreak where every point starts on a second serve. Or add a rule that a double fault ends the whole game. The serve stays the same; the stakes climb. That is how you find out whether the skill is actually stable.
What the coach watches for
The tell is almost always tempo. When a player gets tight, the ball toss drops, the motion speeds up, and the serve gets pushed rather than swung. So the cue I give is not mechanical — it is a rhythm cue tied to the routine between points. Breathe, pick the target, see the ball land there, then go. That routine is our sixth pillar, Channel the Fire, doing its job: the frustration and nerves are real, and instead of pretending they are not there, the player runs them through a short, repeatable routine that resets the body before the toss goes up. A steady toss is usually the first thing to come back once the routine is in place.
I also resist the urge to over-coach here. When a serve misses in the game, I do not stop play to rebuild the motion. I let the score do the teaching. A player who just went minus-two on a double fault does not need a lecture — they need the next second serve, right away, with the same stake on it. Reps under consequence teach faster than my voice does.
Making it fit your court
You do not need a coach or a fancy setup to run a version of this at home in Sarasota. Grab a hitting partner, put a towel or a cone on the backhand side of each box, and play a set where every point starts on a second serve, double fault counts double. Twenty minutes of that will tell you more about your serve than an hour of quiet reps. If you want a target you can actually see, the deep corner of the service box is the safest high-percentage spot for most juniors — plenty of net clearance, plenty of margin.
For the parents reading this: if your player comes off the court frustrated after a session like this, that is not a bad sign. A drill that never produces a miss is not testing anything. The point is to fail a little in practice so there are fewer surprises in the match. What you want to see over a few weeks is the double-fault count dropping while the stakes stay high. That is the number that matters, and it is one you can track together at home.
We build the whole serve this way at SRQ Tennis — small, countable targets inside live conditions, pressure added on top of a stable base rather than a base built in silence. If you want to see how the rest of it fits together, the coaching page walks through the approach, and the USTA’s coaching resources cover the fundamentals of serve development if you want to read further.
A dependable second serve is not a gift some players are born with. It is built, one consequential rep at a time. Give the miss a real cost, hold a real target, and let the score do the teaching.
See you on the court.
— Coach Michael